I already have a LinkedIn account (http://www.linkedin.com/in/whitnisuarez) so I decided to research and sign up for a NING account for this assignment. In my opinion, LinkedIn is more for professional “networking” which allows you to meet and make connections with other professionals. Those connections can be used to help you network with like minded professionals, further your employment or in some cases, help employers find new employees. The deciding factor to go with NING is that I did not want to add all of my personal information to my LinkedIn profile at this time. I still have a lot of “gaps” in education that I would like to fill prior to posting to the “world wide web”.
It was quick and easy to sign up for my NING account which you can view at http://whitnisuarez.ning.com :
The site is very flexible in allowing you to edit the layout as well as the “look and feel” (colors, etc.) of the site. Similar to Facebook, you have an area called “what brings you here” where you can type in a short messages (140 characters) and also decide to “tweet” your message by selecting the twitter box right below the message:
I found a lot of the same functionality that is available to us on our class site http://classes.kenleyneufeld.com/ and Facebook (www.facebook.com/whitnisuarez ) on the NING site such as blog posting, forums, posting photos and videos, creating a status and sending personal messages.
NING also has about 253 applications that you can pick and choose different categories to add to your site. I chose to add Quotes, Geek.com, “Eye tester” which is a fun game to test your eye reflex time as well as a few music applications.
Like Facebook, you can “invite” members to sign up and join your network. Since I just signed up for the account and am still researching and learning about all the features available, I will continue to test it out to see how it might benefit me in the future.