Social websites, Ning and Online Groups.net

This week I am investigating social websites, I found an old friend listed on Old Friends and revisted my very basic Facebook site which I set up as part of the 23 2.0 web learning things. Libraries see that social networks are where people are they want to use them to foster librarian user communication and to create chat-room forums and groups. Forums and groups can be used to foster discussion for research assignments public libraries can use them to engage with customers for feedback on library services and to provide spaces for user generated content. I can see much potential but as yet it seems to be early days for most libraries.
I was interested to see the software available to set up your own social network.
OnlineGroups.Net is business and education/library oriented it enables you to share files and conversations creat public or private groups. You can chat in real time and manage multiple document versions enabling projects to run across multiple organizations. It provides workspaces for virtual teams, web forums for customer engagements, message board and discussion forums. Online groups are like list serves with message boards, file sharing and chat.
Ning is a free website for setting up your own social network and is as easy to use as Bebo with templates you can pick from and customize. You can pick a template which and modify the colours, choose which elements to such as blog, groups, events, comments wall and where you wish to place them on your site. You can upload your photos from Flickr yur computer or your camera and invite users from your outlook address book or web mail provider or enter them manually. Apps are also available such as Google docs and trivial games such as BuddyPoke. Darrylsccllearn is my ning site for which I sent an invitation to my CCLlearn group and my facilitator. I found this fun it was like setting up a Bebo site crossed with a blog. Ning makes it easy to set up a social network its the most fun I've had with the CCLlearn modules so far. My daughter of course it would be my 12 year old daughter, already knew about Ning and pointed out her favourite website Max-Dan-Wiz uses Ning to support its social network pages. I don't know whether I've missed the invitation but I don't seem to have received one to join the CCLlearn Ning group so I have been unable to contribute to it, but I did join the Maximum Ride ning group. I also added my Ning site and a few photos to my Facebook profile.