One of the mailing lists I’m on has gotten into several interesting discussions about Ning, Elgg, Twitter, Flickr and related sites. I've been busy working away on other things and quietly listening to the discussion in the background. However, I have had a little time to digest things and wanted to share my thoughts. I wrote this initially as a response to the list and have edited it to be a blog post here.

Ning: One discussion was about changes to the Ning Terms of Service that many people found offensive. As best as I can tell Ning is just as evil as Yahoo, Google, Facebook, MySpace and the rest of them. When you are essentially giving your content to someone else for their cost of providing the service, it seems to be up to the terms of service they provide about what they will do with it, and pretty much all of them are in it for a profit. It makes sense to push back at times, and this might be a time to push back at Ning, but I'm not a big Ning user, so I'm not getting active in that cause.

Elgg: Someone on the list mentioned Elgg as an open source competitor to Ning. I forgot who mentioned it, but to whomever did, thank you. I've now installed Elgg on my machine. It was a fairly simple install, at least for someone who has a VPS account and experience setting up other open source packages.

Elgg is current at version 1.5 and it acts like it. The parts that work, work very nicely and cleanly. I really like the parts that work. Other parts that they talk about that I'm interested in exploring just don't seem to be there. The OpenID client portion seems to work, but doesn't have the ability, as far as I can see, to add OpenID to an existing user. I couldn't find any way of getting FOAF to work, and it looks like it may take a while to figure out how best to change customize a theme.

It also has it's own microblogging and its connectivity to Twitter. It is pulling in Twitter feeds nicely but I haven't been able to get it to send feeds out yet.

The support community looks fairly sparse as of yet but as more people start experimenting with Elgg I expect to see the community grow.

All of that said, it looks like a fun tool to play with. Anyone who wants to play with my Elgg setup is free to join at http://elgg.smartcampaigns.com. It is a test site, and may go away abruptly. Feedback is appreciated about Elgg and ways to make the best use of it.

So far, I don't have a need to set up Elgg for any group, but I think it is a good tool to have in the toolkit.

Twitter: Another discussion was about FollowCost. I follow lots of people on Twitter and have lots of followers. I find followcost interesting, but only a very minor factor. Put simply, it gives the sum of the signal and the noise of a person's twitter stream. For some people that can be very high, and it might be because they have a lot of information. For other people it can be fairly low, but they have no useful information.

I do agree with everyone else that talks about the importance of Twitter clients. I end up using a large mix of many Twitter clients. Right now, I use PeopleBrowser as a primary client.

Flickr: Someone asked about Flickr. I use the simple aspects of Flickr a lot and have often recommended it to organizations for these aspects. It is nice to have a place to put your photos that other people will come look at. Beyond that, I use ability to mail pictures to Flickr, so when I take a picture from my cellphone, I send it to a special email address that Flickr sets up. This allows my picture to show up on Flickr right away.

On my cellphone, I can send an email to a list of people, so I send my pictures to Facebook, Flickr, Utterli and Zannel. As an aside, I do the same thing with videos, sending them to blip.tv, facebook, Utterli, Youtube and Zannel.

I also have a special account where I send a picture and text to Flickr. Flickr stores the photo on their site and the sends the picture and text to my blog as a blog post. It provides a great way to blog when you are off at some event. If your group organizes events, I strongly recommend this. You can build buzz about events as they happen.

I have added people as friends on Flickr and joined some Flickr groups, but that isn't really an important part of the discussions I'm part of.

There are a lot of different sites and services that can suck up every minute of your time. On a different list, one person mentioned Retaggr as a way to keep track of all these different sites. I'm http://www.retaggr.com/Page/ahynes1 there. It is a pretty nice site. For another similar, and very nice site, check out DandyID. I'm http://www.dandyid.org/users/ahynes1 there.

These sites can be good at helping people find all your content online and they’re probably worth looking at.

However, the key thing to come back to is, what are you trying to do anyway? How are you using social media to support your mission? For me personally, what I'm trying to do is to know as much as possible about as many different social media tools so I can help others make good use of them. So, I'm on just about every service I can find. Others have very different purposes, raising awareness about a cause, fundraising, etc. Figure out what you want to do, and then look for tools that help you do it.