Michigan.TV new design, new tools to provide unlimited services.

We redesign Michigan.TV to meet our community objectives. What are these objectives, how it will affect our services and remain FREE to use for everyone.

Here's our objectives:

1. make it a friendly user environment, easy for our visitors and members to post blogs, upload photos and videos, sharing comments to blogs, and best of all unlimited service no worries about limits.
2. you can customize your personal page (mypage) using our existing templates or upload your own standard CSS outline.
3. with your "mypage" you have the option to paste your affiliate banner or ad campaign to make money. This is why our community is unique, you use our FREE service to make money. For details, visit http://www.michigan.tv/ community for details.
4. outsource our platform so we can concentrate addressing our members need and marketing to grow our community. Of course, we need your help to promote Michigan.TV to your family and friends.
5. FREE service for unlimited blogs, upload photo and videos.

Please visit and join Michigan.TV New Media Community.
Thank you.

Cityware.com building local community one city at a time.

Cityware.com is building local community one city at a time. To socialize with your local community or find out what business within your neighborhood, all you have to do is type the URL Address nameofyourcity.cityware.com and start using the FREE service. If you can't find your local community Cityware.com will build one for your local community.

Here are some examples of local community that you can join:
http://Orlando.cityware.com
http://LosAngeles.cityware.com
http://SanFrancisco.cityware.com
http://Boston.cityware.com
http://LasVegas.cityware.com
http://WashingtonDC.cityware.com
http://Baltimore.Cityware.com
http://Dallas.cityware.com
http://NYC.cityware.com

and to see the complete listing, please visit http://local.cityware.com website.

Centralize login, never create a new account when you visit another city. You can only use one account to jump from one city to city. For example; your home city is NYC, you can login and join to another city with the same username and password. The cityware.com community is powered by Grou.ps and it is a FREE service for everyone.

Join your local community now at Cityware.com social networking community.

Grou.ps Pulls In $1.1 Million, Opens Up Code To Take On Ning

Grou.ps, a startup based in San Francisco, has secured a $1.1 Million Series A financing round in a deal led by Golden Horn Ventures. Grou.ps will also now be open-sourcing a restricted version of its code, with a view to spreading its collaboration tools. This move is based around the idea of commoditizing the platform faster and then taking advantage of the fact that they can then hire the best programmers out there. Currently Grou.ps has about 200,000 active users worldwide, after launching a public beta in April.

The site offers chat, blogs, wikis, forums, mailing lists, photo albums, bookmarking, calendaring and maps among other features. You can run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one Grou.ps domain using a single login. It also will mash with content from Flickr and YouTube. In fact if it sounds a little like Ning or Wetpaint, then that’s because it has several aspects in common with those sites. One of the main differences are that Ning - with $104 Million in backing - has a much larger number of users and also runs ads, whereas Grou.ps doesn’t (apart from the AdSense code group owners can add).

Source: TechCrunch

Choose the right Social Networking application.

If you are looking to establish your own community e.g social networking, here's a review completed by the geeks in TechCrunch. I agree with their finding about Ning. I actually use Ning in some of our project such as RandomPage.com (formerly known as Plogging.com) and DNConference.com Domain Name for Business.

---
The news may overflow with stories about the social networking giants, such as Facebook and MySpace, but a horde of companies are doing their best to reduce the fundamental features of these websites to mere commodities. These up-and-coming companies provide so-called “white label” social networking platforms that enable their customers to build their own social networks (often from scratch) and to tailor those networks to a range of purposes.

The idea of white labeling a network is to make the platform provider as invisible as possible to the social network’s users and to brand the network with the builder’s identity or intent. While definitions of “social networking” may vary, social networks are primarily defined by member profiles and some sort of user generated content.

There are roughly three types of companies that have emerged in the space of white label social networking. The first provides hosted, do-it-yourself solutions with which customers can largely point and click their way to a brand new social network. Companies of this type interact minimally with their customers and rather focus on providing the network-building tools that they demand.

We have taken a sample of nine of these companies - Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn, CollectiveX, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, Haystack, and ONEsite - all of which provide free baseline services, and reviewed them individually below. We have also included the chart on the right summarizing all of these companies’ offerings. Credit for initial research into these companies goes to Jeremiah Owyang who compiled a comprehensive list of white label social networking services.

Source: TechCrunch
---