Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary is a social network for fans of the eponymous online comedy, Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary. Named one of the “Best Podcasts of 2007″ by iTunes, the series is written and produced by Hayden Black, who also stars as 13-year-old Abigail. Abigail is your average 8th grader, dealing with crushes on boys, feuding parents, and a (fake) rare genetic disease that makes her look like a middle-aged man.

What’s refreshing about the show is not only the amazingly awkward situations Abigail gets into, but the accessibility of the show. Produced in one minute episodes added several times a week, it taps into the feeling of being an outsider we’ve all had at one time or another.

Abigail’s network officially launched a little over a week ago. Members include everyone from teenage girls to Hayden himself, and are encouraged to add their own photos, blog posts, and videos alongside Abigail’s. Here’s the teaser trailer for the show in the network’s branded embeddable video player:

Find more videos like this on Abigail's X-Rated Teen Diary

I had the pleasure of asking Black a few questions about the show and the brand new network. Read his answers after the jump!

Continue reading Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary: It’s Comedy, People, Not Porn…

No other element or feature of a social network elicits as much venom or praise as the member profile page. Why? It’s simple:

Profile pages on social networks represent the very heart of freedom, self-expression, and the ability to make something uniquely your own.

A profile page is all mine to do (almost) anything I want with it.

Profile Page Features

So, this is my profile page on Ning’s Network Creators:

By default, my profile page comes with the following features:

• A Profile Photo that I have the option to add and can change at will.
• A Profile Section on the right column whose questions are customized by the Network Creator and presented to every new member who joins. Network Creators can make these questions required or optional.
• A Simple URL that always takes the same structure. You can find me on any network on which I am a member by adding “/profile/gina” to the end of any profile URL, including domain masked ones. This means if you’re on We Live Here [Uploaded], you can find my profile by typing in http://welivehere.fineliving.com/profile/gina.
• A Blog.
• A Comment Wall where other people can leave messages for me.
• My Friends and notifications when I have new friend requests.
• The option for other members to request to be my friend or send me a message.
• The ability to completely change every aspect of my page via the Edit the Appearance link in the upper right of the page. I can choose from themes or use my own CSS and HTML. I haven’t changed the appearance of my page yet in this example.

Beyond these basics, for each feature you, as the Network Creator, add to your social network, each feature shows up on every member’s profile page as well.

Continue reading Anatomy of a Profile Page…

I feel a little like Forrest Gump stumbling through history, but here’s an illustrated timeline of my personal website, House of Kyle:

Handmade HTML (Early/Mid-1990s)

Inspired by Mosaic (wink), I did a series of personal experiments writing basic HTML by hand. Aside from a “Contact Me” link at the bottom, the first House of Kyle was very much a one-way street. I posted. End of story.

In hindsight, it’s fairly horrifying, but my restraint in the lack of an animated .gif mailbox is commendable.

WYSIWYG Software (Mid/Late-1990s)

Created with the help of some early WYSIWYG tools like FrontPage (shudder), this was a little more elegant for the time. At this point, the “Contact Me” has morphed into a contact form, but that was still the extent of reader involvement on House of Kyle.

Continue reading House of Kyle: A Blog’s Life…

One aspect of Ning about which we’re keenest is the facility it provides for people to go from merely consuming to creating. We call it the Ning Playground because it’s a forum for the best attributes of play: experimentation, creativity, and most of all, fun. Benjamin Wilkoff is a teacher who’s using some of Ning’s playful aspects to give his students a place to to experiment with reading and writing online. He’s also taking advantage of Ning’s easy app creation to rapidly produce a variety of educational resources for his local district. In this conversation I asked him about the many ways he uses online services to assist in his teaching, and how his students have thrived as a result.

Continue reading A Chat with Benjamin Wilkoff, School Teacher…

Rob Mowery has been an active user, developer and advocate for Ning going back almost all the way to our launch late last year. Not only has he created a whole load of Apps, but he regularly sends us great tips about the new technologies we should be investigating. I spoke to him about his many and varied apps, music-teaching software and what he’d like to see Ning do next.

Continue reading A Chat with Rob Mowery…

Shortly after Ning debuted in October, one user-created app rapidly established itself as the most popular on the system. That it took several months to unseat it was not a major surprise. Girl On Girl mixes the addictive simplicity of This Or That with several hundred female celebrities, but it doesn’t end there. As well as being Ning’s first big user-created hit, it was also the first Ning App to be heavily customized by its owner.

Ivan Bueno didn’t just add content; he rewrote the detail page code to automatically pull information from Wikipedia, Flickr and Amazon. That’s why it’s spawned over 150 new apps, including Player On Player for soccer fans, the remarkably-popular Citroen Battle and the inevitable Sexiest Man.

Ten months after it first appeared, Girl On Girl still sits comfortably amongst our most popular Apps. Now seems as good at time as any to see how things are going on the inside…

Continue reading A Chat with Ivan Bueno, Creator of Girl On Girl…

Barely a week goes by without Stephen Paul Weber (username singpolyma) popping up on our radar screens with yet another cool tool he’s hacked together using Ning, Javascript, XML, RSS, duct tape and string. Tools for bloggers? Folksonomy explorers? Javascript code stores?

Not only has he built it all, he’s usually done his coding over a low-bandwidth line from Africa. Stephen’s work demonstrates that Ning’s not just useful for cloning existing apps - it’s great for getting your own code projects up and running fast. He recently showed off his nifty feed-parsing library in a guest post on our Tech Blog - now it’s time to meet the man behind the code.

Continue reading A Chat with Stephen Paul Weber…

Since 2002, Amy’s Robot has been essential reading for those in the know. The blog provides a compelling stream of news, celebrity gossip and political opinion, addictively flavored with their own brand of wit and snark. They’ve now expanded their efforts into a number of single-topic blogs such as ScaryNY, Bad Love and The Ledger.

ADM and Amy

Alongside, there’s a barrage of web links compiled using Linkit, their social linkblogging service descended from our own Bookmarks. Linkit is not only one of the oldest Ning apps, it’s consistently one of the most popular - yet more proof of Amy’s Robot’s ever-expanding fanbase. The team behind it, however, are fairly reclusive in the face of internet fame; so I’m proud to have coaxed them into discussing their various blogs, favorite celebs, and the secrets of their success…

Continue reading A Chat with the “Amy’s Robot” Team…

Sam Mbale (pictured right) is the owner of Truly Zambian, a Group clone which gathers Zambian nationals scattered around the world. Sam is based in London and runs MappiBiz, a web hosting company. His colleague Susan Mwape is based in Lusaka, the Zambian capital.

What brought you to Ning, and what do you use it for?

Sam: I came across Ning while I was researching “Web 2.0″ and open source business applications. My Ning applications are focused on community issues or business interests. I try to promote collaborative activities and encourage innovative and creative ideas.

Continue reading A Chat with Sam Mbale and Susan Mwape of Truly Zambian…

Following on from last week’s chat with the creator of CCHits, we’re taking a look at another very popular Ning App - or rather, a set of Apps. The Utopia! Exhibition is both an art project and a contest in which visitors can submit and rate photographs. There are eight different divisions, each with its own App, cloned from our own very popular This Or That. The top-ranked entries in each division will be exhibited as part of Fair Exchange at the Millard Sheets Gallery, and the whole project is part of the 2006 LA County Fair. Note that the deadline for both submission and voting is this Sunday, July 2nd, at which point voting will be turned off - so if you want to take part as either an artist or voter, you’d better move fast.

This is a large and fascinating project which raises and exercises issues regarding the roles of artist, curator and viewer. It’s also a great demonstration of how relatively simple social apps can be used in new and ambitious ways. The man behind it all is Jeff Cain (pictured above right, photographed by Dercum Over). In this interview we wander through the issues raised by the project, the patterns of submissions and votes so far, and how he’s been using Ning to power it all.

Continue reading A Chat with Jeff Cain, Creator of The Utopia! Exhibition…