Ning v. Elgg v. Dolphin

Our non-profit is looking into setting up a social network for our members. We need the site to be secure above all. We want this to be open to younger people so want to be able to monitor what is going on in the site. Cost is a factor but not as big a factor as safety and the ability to monitor. If anyone has experience with any of these sites and may beable to give me some input it would much appreciated.

Hi there Steve,

I'm pretty familiar with Ning, but I hadn't heard of Elgg or Dolphin before today. So I can't really give a very helpful answer. Hopefully we can find some other people to speak specifically to those services.

One question I had, though, is about the extent to which you want to be able to moderate activity. For example, on a site like Ning, you can certainly moderate blog posts and comments, but I don't think you can monitor private messages that members send to each other. For that, I'm pretty sure you'd need a self-hosted service.

Perhaps if you're able to explicate both what kind of activity you'd like to see happen on the site and what kind of control you'd like to have, the right solution will make itself more apparent.

Happy Friday,
Elliot

we're a mentoring organization that works matching high school and grade school kids during the school year, we've recetly been trying to expand into carrying these relationship over the summer. we advise the kids to not give out personal info to their mentors (ie; phone, facebook. myspace, email) for liability reasons. I was hoping that with one of these white-label social networks would allow us a place for the kids to interact while we would still have some amount of visibilty within. Also we want to use it so we can keep in touch with them for the many summer programs we run

Steve