If you're as fond of reading Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd as I am- then you've gotta be jumping with joy.

Here's Daily Tech's appraisal on New York Time's move to open up its select columns. I just set up rss's for the columns. I like this new addition to my morning reading.

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 I love social networks. I love them because they have so much potential in terms of allowing people to organize themselves. Its amazing. Well at least to an organizational psychologist. Once you hand over control to a community, you can sit back and watch people take initiative, feel enabled and every once in a while create something wonderful.

Up until now though, social networks have been mainly limited to two categories.

1. The first are the generic, get your profile up on a known universe kind that you can use to stay connected with friends. Orkut, facebook, myspace etc belong to this group (I have to point out though, that facebook allows you to do a lot more than just exchange messages and pictures, that too in a privacy sensitive manner).
2. The second are the specialized networks created by organizations that can afford to pay for custom services, and are hence beyond the reach of niche groups, who simply want to get together, collaborate and feed off each others' ideas. Free services from the archaic web era, like msn and yahoo groups, fall woefully below standards in terms of facilitating conversations and energy.

Well now, people have options. In an article on TechCrunch titled 9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network, Mark Hendrickson outlines several free services that allow you to organize around niche interests and passions.

I've been looking to create a private social network for a peer mentoring effort for a while. I tried Kickapps and Ning, but since Kickapps doesn't offer private networks, we finally went with Ning, and I have to say are soooo glad for it.

If Kathy Sierra was still blogging, I bet she could've used the Ning team as a case study in how to create passionate users! Ning has created a platform that scales beautifully, both in terms of number of users, and expertise of the administrator, allowing immense customization to the html+css (php is a bonus!) literate. They work on two week release cycles, which means that every two weeks the users can expect a gift of fresh features, in large part driven by the wish lists that the users themselves submit. I love it!

Considering the web is still in the process of maturing, I can think of a lot of websites/blogs that would be better served by a social networking platform. Plus starting an open social network can be a great way to market a new product or service. By the by, I was pleasantly surprised to find a RecruitingBlogs community at ning-- and even though it has feeds from Recruiting.com all over it, I dunno how related the two sites are. 

Anyhow, if you're part of a small organization or simply a group of people looking for a collaboration boost, go ahead get a social network for yourself. A network on ning, combined with the share your files widget from www.box.net provide quite a powerful suite to get the brainstorming going!

Not to mention, that these are great tools for learning/development specialist to have in their kit. If your primary job is to facilitate interaction and flow of ideas, then as an OD person, it really helps to know this stuff.

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