Crowdvine: make your own social network

Following my access logs and obviously late to the discussion. Good early feedback, much appreciated.

I'm building CrowdVine because I want to see social networks treated as first class social media applications, joining blogs, wikis, and pod/video-casts.

In response to the nothing to do but read blogs comment, in a niche social network the people are the content. Connecting to them and finding ways to build an identity within the community are the main activities. If you're applying social networks in way that ties in with people's identity then you can have a lot of socializing without a lot of features. If you're (mis)applying a social network to a topic that has nothing to do with people's identity then you're going to have to build in a lot of other activities.

I think it's a big boon that Ning decided to focus just for the fact that it helps define the market. They obviously have an amazing team. It'll be interesting to see if they stay with the social-networks-for-everyone market given that they're already doing deals for bigger networks (for CBS), neither of their founders actually uses the software to run a social network, and that they're already 27 people big and 9 million in the hole.

Both let you create social networks, but they're quite different. Ning seems to be more about hosting social networks that you create with your service -- your social network is standalone and is your own personal niche MySpace.

Crowdvine has a single community feel to it, with users joining multiple groups based on arbitrary titles ('Cool People Who Know Kati' is one example). It's more group-creating than social network-creating, which would be ideal for smaller scope congregation. Further, however, Crowdvine doesn't let you do anything once you're in a group besides read blog entries from other members.

I am guessing Ning already has the upper hand in this niche. Perhaps if this application had launched a few months ago, it would have made similar waves as Ning.