Clarence Wooten of CollectiveX left a comment, informing me that his company has been doing meta-networks for a year now. I had heard of CollectiveX but had no idea that they were also a network or networks - offered as a hosted solution. I wonder if they also OEM/white label their system, like Me.com (but not Ning.)

So I went and set up Cantertown.

CollectiveX is a platform geared trowards businesses and folks who want to group together - inside the firewall. They have concepts like objectives, bios and dates. They call things filing cabinets and discussions. I wouldn’t exactly call CollectiveX a soical network per se - as it lacks many of the standards features that Ning, Me.com and PeopleAggregator have - but that’s OK. Vive diffrance!

It’s coolio to see others come upon the same realization I did. So it doesn’t really matter if Ning or Me.com copied us or not. The point is that meta-networks enable 100,000’s of small, niche neworks. That is diametrically opposed to the notion of giant, centralized social networks - with 10,000,00’s of members in one network.
Metcalfe’s Law does not rule here. It’s not about ‘the more the merrier’. I’d rather be in a network of people like myself, then cast together with millions of kids trying to get laid.

So right on to CollectiveX, right on to Ning and Me.com too - and let’s all work together ot support OpenID, get it moved into the era of OpenID 2, withan attribute exchange so we can all offer to our customers the ability to move their entire network - from system to system.

Now THAT will be coolio!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.