Check out Idle Thumbs' Ning page

[Marek]

Disclaimer: This is not some kind of official Idle Thumbs 'thing'. Thumb is dead. I just thought creating a Thumb group might be a fun way to experiment with a new online service.

Okay, I made an Idle Thumbs page over at Ning. It's a startup by Marc Andreessen (who was the original guy behind Netscape and Mosaic). It allows you to set up your own social network really fast.

It's different from MySpace, Facebook et al in that it's meant for smaller groups, and it allows anyone to create blog posts, a profile that's almost your own mini-website and even splinter off into smaller sub-groups. E.g. if you join Idle Thumbs but for some reason want to start a Mecha Goose fan club, you can do that within the Idle Thumbs group.

Whatever. I'm just trying it out. Come join.

[DanJW]

Thumbs isn't dead damn you! It's just been driven into torpor.

So this 'ning thing is like a much better version of Yahoo groups?

[Marek]

Okay. Fine. "Comatose."

Anyway yeah it's kinda like Yahoo groups, FaceBook and Wordpress merged into one.

[DanJW]

I with thinking more like the sleep of the undead.

[Marek]

Listen. I'm not a nerd or anything.

[DanJW]

Calm down Adama. No one likes it when you get angry and threaten to nuke things

[Spaff]

the publishing side of it is dead, the community lives on.

[ysbreker]

Get with the program and sign up already, Dan

[Erkki]

Does it support OpenID? I'm really excited about OpenID. Estonia started a ID provider that allows anyone with an eID card to have a semi-official openID with two-factor security. For example, mine is http://open.id.ee/erkki.lindpere_NNNN (and the NNNN numbers will be gone once my certificates are updated to a newer version). A later version will allow anonymous ID-s as well, but still guaranteeing that it belongs to a real Estonian citizen or resident.

(but OpenID is not quite secure enough for online banking, elections and stuff)

Something like this in every country could enable all kinds of cool things with social networks and stuff. For example, online petitions could have signatures that are almost certainly from real, different people, even if using anonymous ID-s. And different social networking services could interoperate better -- I've never used Facebook, but I understand that it also allows that -- but you have to give Facebook control of everything. With OpenID, control remains in your hands.

But there are privacy issues with this, of course.

[nsps]

Is this like that Twitter thing I've heard so much about but never bothered to try? Or is that different? (Yes, I'm that lazy.)