This blog post could be eye-opening for parents or anyone who might think putting any single social site’s feet to the fire would take care of teen social-Web safety problems: TechCrunch looks at “Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network”. In other words, if MySpace or Facebook somehow went away – besides the option of simply moving to another social site based in the US or not – teens of course have the option to create their own personal social-networking site (this is really no different from the days when it seemed novel to be able to create your own blog, and services like Blogger made it supremely easy with templates and color schemes, etc.). I’ve written about Ning in the past (see “Do-it-yourself social sites” and “Mini-MySpaces”). Now Ning is just one of nine such sites in a single category of the possibilities available for personal social sites (not pages or profiles or blogs but entire mini-Facebooks, -Bebos, or -MySpaces). The services in this first category are hosted by the service (for free, and anyone can create his/her site in 10 minutes or less). The other two categories get higher-end; the first type you put on your own server, which is no big deal for many teens; the third is more a business solution, where a company custom-builds a social site for its client. I’m sure the state attorneys general have been focusing on MySpace for so long are aware of this, right?
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