I have a confession to make and it's going to give my age away.
I've joined a Ning for the combined 20 YEAR reunion for Allen D. Nease High School classes of 89-90-91. They hunted me down, said all sorts of nice things to me about how they missed me and I joined the Ning. Class of 1991 - Go Panthers! (it's not been 20 years for me. yet.)
Wow. I feel old.
The Ning is neat in that only those who are invited can join and we feel very comfortable in our 30 something world of career and personal updates. You create a profile very much like Facebook or MySpace and you can customize the Ning to do all sorts of whiz-bang things. Members have posted videos of themselves surfing, scanned pictures from high school (YIKES!!!), added polls, comments, created message boards. Overall, I really, really like the Ning format. I'm really comfortable with the Facebook style features and it feels more conversational than a Wiki.
It has latest a latest activity newsfeed, slideshows, newest members joined...you can also make your profile page look spiffy with themes, widgets and such.
I would love to see our youth services team move to a Ning. We use a wiki now and it feels cumbersome.
Oh, if only I didn't have to feel old to join my first Ning.
I'm gonna definitely have to do some more Ning investigating as I have my Reunion coming up this year. It's insane! I can't get over the fact that it's already here! But what a great tool. I'll be interested to see how it compares to our wiki.
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