IT 5130: Week 4 Tools

Ning
http://www.ning.com/

Ning allows you to create your own social space, similar to Facebook and MySpace. To me, the most attractive aspect about Ning is that you can customize your network to suit your own needs and you don’t have to be internet-tool savvy to do it…which bodes well for me.


Twitter
http://twitter.com/

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service. You can send and read “tweets” (updates) from your friends. The tweets are text-based posts no longer than 140 characters in length.

Twitter has over 2 million users, including a church in Jackson, Michigan that uses it as a part of its weekend worship services. The church encourages parishoners to make observations and ask questions, creating an interactive worship service.

However, it seems to me that Twitter is more of a messenger-type service, used primarily for notifications and two to three sentence thoughts. Now that I’m actually using a blog, I’m not sure if I’d even call it micro-blogging. But it is good for the short message.


ToAnswer
http://toanswer.net/

“ToAnswer is a Twitter mashup that will help you get your questions answered quickly; think Yahoo! Answers meets Twitter.”

Of course, I had to look up what the heck a “mashup” is. To those of us who are technologically challenged, think “portal”. On ToAnswer, you can pose a question and hope someone will have the knowledge and inclination to answer you. Opinion questions sure seemed to get loads of responses: “How do you measure your life (well-being)? Any specific indicators or dimensions to
consider?” 971 answers in 11 days.


Pownce
http://pownce.com/

Pownce is very similar to Twitter, as it is also a free social networking and micro-blogging site. However, Pownce also lets you file-share and send event invitations to the general public or a restricted access group.