WEEK 2

Ning:

http://www.ning.com/

Reference Article: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/125/nings-infinite-ambition.html

What is Ning? Well I found out that Ning is apparently one of the competitor sites for MySpace and Facebook. It is a way to create your own personal social networking system built around whatver topic that you want. The way that it is unique is the feature of Ning is that anyone can create their own social network for a particular topic or need, catering to specific membership bases. So you can create a Ning account that is based on ways to communicate in the workplace, and someone else could have one that is based on finding the right club around your area. Those specific topics will guide you to other users, or other users to you that are interested in those topics. After a while of being released, Ning narrowed its focus to offering a group website, a photos website, and a videos website for people to copy and use for any purpose. These three templates were later superseded by a single customizable application aimed at enabling anyone to easily create their own social network. So they branched away from having three distinct type of sites, and allowed thier users to create one with whatever kind of applications they saw fit.

Ning can be used if say a teacher wants to create a virtual website and have her students learn off of it. The students could play a part and bring in different feeds and resources to allow multiple ways of learning. The teacher could even create a different styled template for each individual class she teaches.

Skype:

http://www.skype.com/

Reference Article: http://voip.about.com/od/voipsoftware/a/whatisskype.htm

is a downloadable software application that allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet.  Calls to other users of the service and to free-of-charge numbers are free, while calls to othe landlines and mobile phone can be made for a fee. Some other features they offer are instant messaging, file stransfer, and video conferencing. This sounds like something to me that once you get into, can be very useful for your business, family, and education. A lot of oppurtunities are available with this application. Although it is not free, the small fees seem to be reasonable for the extent of what you would be recieving. Calls are pretty unlimited too, offering calls in many countries around the world to allow thier users to keep in touch wherever they go, and find new calling partners as you go!

Skype can be used if you are doing mission work and you need to communicate with your missionaries across the world. For example. You start a mission in Haiti, and your workers are in Haiti, while your presidents are in the U.S., you could have a video meeting over your phone with skype allowing mobile meetings with visible content and footage straight from the mission site.

Mashups:

http://www.mashuptown.com/

Reference Article: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-mashups.html

In web developments, a mashup is a web application that combines data from one or more sources into a single integrated tool. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open API’s and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. An example of a mashup is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct Web service that was not originally provided by either source.

Mashups are a little confusing to me still, but maybe you could almost create a mashup that acts like an aggregator. You could bring in multiple sources of information about the same topic and organize in a blog type manner, but allow anyone access to it and allows them to add to and comment or write about what you are offering and give ideas on how to expand it even more.