Hey everybody,

With the power of Facebook (somewhere around 130 million unique views a month). And MySpace, Hi5, Freindster, Bebo… there seems to be thousands of these. And the ones that I mentioned before are really universal or unfocused networks. But Ning provides a free way to create your own niche social network. It currently has many many networks that range in topic from politics, to business, to art, to everything else.

It is really easy to use. The back end WYSIWYG is very nice, it looks a lot like wordpress. And almost everything is drag and drop. Ning also offers many languages so you can localize your specific, custom network almost anywhere.

You can get your thousands of workers, shareholders, friends and/or family to all connect and share in one place. It is basically a Facebook for whatever you want. One example that I really like of a ning community is RecruitingBlogs. RecruitingBlogs is a powerful, head-hunter or recruiter social network. It has more than 16,000 members. It is a great resource for recruiters, tons of informative blog posts.

Ning can be a very powerful, cheap tool. and I really like it. If you are interested in building an area for your ideation shareholders to contribute and collaborate with you, check out Ning. Good luck getting started. Just remember to keep your brand consistent with the same images and color scheme as your blog and Web site. I even try to pick a theme or template that matches my other themes.

Take it easy,

William Flavell

Aloha from your friends at Sprout,Big news! With all your great help and support, we are pleased to announce that Sprout is now moving to an open beta. What this means is that we are open for the world and anyone can now access the Sprout Builder immediately. A big thanks for your continued support and suggestions, some of which have been included into the recent V 1.1. product release and others you will notice will be included as we move forward.Your enthusiasm has been amazing and infectious! In just five short weeks 5,000 of you in our closed private beta have created over 17,000 sprouts which generated over 11 million views. Cool and unique sprouts are being created from users all over the world. At last count people from over 30 countries have joined the party. We have you, the Sprout community, to thank for our excellent start.Last week we released our first incremental update to Sprout (V 1.1) which included many features you requested such as:- “save as” function so you can quickly clone your own sprout
- templates so new users can quickly get started creating their first project
- advanced text controls
- MySpace external links
- Hand tool to grab and move the canvas
- Many more! Check out our blog for a full list.If you have any specific templates you would like to see please let us know and we will make it happen. We encourage you to continue giving us feedback as we make changes to both our website and Sprout builder. Check our change logs in the forums and blog to read about new features as they are released.

We still have lots more to do in terms of incorporating your suggestions into the product. High atop our list are the following improvements that we look forward to releasing next month:

- undo
- animations
- more components
- remove Sprout bar option
- and lots of cool other stuff

It’s been an exciting time for us. The reaction to the product has been amazing and the support by you, the Sprout community has been a major factor in our early success. The best way for you to help is to tell your friends about Sprout so we can keep growing.

Last but not least we are hiring a bunch of folks to make the product better and to support the Sprout community. If you or any of your friends want to join the team please visit our jobs page.

Thanks again and keep the sprouts blossoming.

Mahalo,

Team Sprout

info@sproutbuilder.com

This is so cool. It is like a Photoshop or Illustrator for Widgets (they call ‘em sprouts).

Check their video: .

You can learn more and read about this program on TechCrunch. This program is still in Beta, but I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

It already has 762 Diggs.

Check it.

Bill