ONLINE EVENT: Online Social Networking - Connecting with Each Other

Hi jbanico,

Are you offering to volunteer to build the application? I have forwarded your message along to our team.

Thanks for stopping by to say hello!

Speaking of AOL's "walled gardens", have you all been keeping abreast of the current threat to Net Neutrality? Large ISPs (such as AOL, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon) as trying to get a bill passed in Congress that will let them set up a caste/toll system. Essentially, large corporation will be able to pay to have better, quicker access to their sites, while sites that don't pay will be relegated to "slow pipes".

As Robert Reich recently commented on NPR, "My blog would take more than 5 minutes to download" under the proposed rules. I worry that this bill would be detrimental to nonprofits, vastly cutting down their access and ability to connect with others.

For more info and to send a letter to Congress, you can check out the following link:


www.savetheinternet.com

Hey greenmoon -

I've definitely been watching this one. To me keeping the Internet neutral, so to speak, is a huge factor in keeping everyone included and on a level playing field, which is in a sense what it's all about to begin with (at least to me). While a "skewed" Internet will have a decidedly negative long-term effect (again, my opinion) on the general dynamic of the Web overall, I agree with your sentiment that smaller, less-funded sites will be the ones taking the hardest hits.

I started a separate post on this and hope to spark some discussion, because I feel that keeping the Internet neutral is of vital importance to anyone who uses the Web -- regardless of who you are or who you work for (unless it's...say...Verizon).

Feel free to lay out your thoughts on it at this thread. And sign that petition if you feel what I'm saying.

Very interesting topic. However, there is a site that offers all these things currently for non-profits,NGOs etc. The site is FREE, which is why we use it. It's a new site called www.groupmembersonly.com. It includes, emails, video library, group library, blogs, newsletters, chat, IM, event calendar, jobs database, discussion forums and other stuff I can't think of now. The site is private, very secure and great for networking with our members. It also allows different organizations to "link" and network with other groups.

We also use it to collect donations, membership fees, and event fees online. They use paypal to do this so it's pretty secure.

Very impressive website, the GroupMembersOnly site. Seems new though, since they only have 185 members or so. But what distinguishes it from other OSN sites is that it allows groups to make connections with each other, not just individuals. That is a pretty important distinction.

I think a more successful service is one that integrates with the image of an organization, rather than being a separate site... which means there is at least some partial data interaction between the servicer and the org's content management system.