January 2009

As we covered in The Perfect Social Network, your Latest Activity feature shows all the activity happening across your social networks as soon as it happens.

It is the single most important feature you can add for driving recurring usage by your members on your social network, especially as you get bigger. And by bigger, we actually mean everyone should use this feature. It’s how people quickly find the best, brightest and most recent stuff on your social network.

The vast majority of people discover a new social network on Ning via invitations from their friends. This is the “viral distribution” mumbo jumbo you’ve been hearing about. Only it’s not actually mumbo jumbo. Rather, it is an incredibly powerful way for people to spread the word about a new social network they’ve created. If your social network is valuable to your members, they will spread the word too. But I digress…