As we covered earlier this week, the Liberal Democrats now have a new social network – ACT. Unsurprisingly one of the most common comments made since its launch has been, “how does this fit with Facebook?”. The party’s previous decision to have a heavy emphasis on using Facebook, both for its centrally inspired social networking activities and also as the tool recommended and supported for widespread use at the local level, was one largely made by myself when working there, so it’s a question that interests me too.
I’m glad to say that the move to set up ACT using Ning looks to me so far to be very much the right one.
First, the party’s heavy focus on Facebook was partly the result of necessity. If you’re short of resources to set up your own tools, get people using the best ones provided by others instead. However, with the party’s recent significant increase in staffing for online campaigning there is now room to be more ambitious.
Second, for all Facebook’s strengths, it is also limiting. Data is hard to get out and many external systems don’t integrate well or at all with it. Ning is more flexible and opens up the possibility for more integration – and even replacement of other systems. (I think this will be the real long-term test for ACT: can the next steps in its development result in it integrating with or replacing enough other tools to make it the essential and convenient place to go? Personally, I’d also love to see the site integrate with the Liberal Democrats Account system so it’s one username and password for all your main Liberal Democrat services.)
Third, Ning itself has developed in many ways that makes it a more potent challenger to Facebook.
As for how you make good use of Ning and Facebook side by side? The success of MyBO for Barack Obama shows it is possible to have both your own social network and make good use of existing external one. But his success is by no means a solitary example and this article gives a good flavour of the ways others have successful used Ning and Facebook together.
Sam Lockwood, who is the key technical person in party HQ working on ACT, explained in an email that,
The network is built on Ning, a Californian based social platform founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini, which currently serves over 37 million registered users worldwide. When assessing different platforms we were particularly impressed by Ning’s commitment to usability and consistent product innovation.
The recent launch of Ning Apps enables us to rapidly deploy new functionality and tools to our users in the run up to the General Election. Ning Apps use OpenSocial as a framework, a set of common application programming interfaces for social applications developed by Google together with a number of large social networks. We plan to release some exciting custom campaigning and fundraising Apps over the coming months to enhance the network and extend its capability.
Chatting to Sam a couple of weeks ago, I’m impressed with the plans that are in place (and slightly envious of the much increased resources the new team now have to work with!). Good luck to them.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Councillor joins Lib Dems in Somerset
Some kids just need more hugs and cuddles
Test post 6
The Joy of Six 1323
Mick Taylor
Steve Trevethan
Ricky Treadwell
Christopher Haigh
Katie Wilson-Downie
7 Comments
Good article Mark. It’s a good start to something I see as a living thing and can grow with how people want to use it. Look at what Facebook was five years ago compared to how it’s used today. The fundraising app is of particular interest…
That’s not *my* key question – mine is just about getting the data out of FlockTogether and into LDAct Events. If Prai sites can do it, then it should be poss for the new Act site.
Mind you, if it keeps happening that things get censored in the site, maybe we should start calling it REDAct
Alex – don’t really know what you mean by saying “keeps happening that things get censored”. Part of the point of Act is to have debate and discussion and we are certainly not going around deleting anything we think is off-message.
However, we do need to make sure that Act provides a good experience for everyone using it, in the same way as any online community does. Act’s community guidelines are here: http://act.libdems.org.uk/notes/Community_Guidlines
Alex
Ning imports the Flock Together RSS feeds quite happily – see http://act.libdems.org.uk/group/winchesterliberaldemocrats for an example.
Unfortunately this will need to be set up manually for every organisation, since Ning doesn’t appear to use any of the party’s standard ways (or even any consistent non-standard ways) of referring to party bodies.
Will investigate if it can read standard event feeds to put the events into the events section or if there’s something different it needs. Perhaps a Flocktogether OpenSocial App (which might be a good idea anyway)? The other option would be to create an app that takes some of the Flock Together infrastructure (geography, party organisation coding) and apply it to Ning Events. A third option would be to take events out of Ning and make sure they get pushed through the rest of the party in the same way as they are from Flock Together.
The advantage of going via Flock Together is that it aggregates into regions (for example) and can put the same event into different groups and feeds. It also gets fed into up to 600 different party websites.
Unfortunately also, I can only get Ning to read one RSS feed – so you can either use your RSS feed for news or use it for events. It doesn’t appear to be possible to do both.
Martin
I think the next question is: how long do those of use who have Faceache accounts need to keep them?
Clearly a lot of thought has been put into developing ACT and it shows fantastic possibilities. For those of us who’d prefer to be able to get away from the computer some times and do some real campaigning, we need to start culling old out of date things.
Mind you I’m told some people still use CiX …
I guess those of us who use FaceBook might be able to gently shepherd people towards ACT and then over a few years FB will simply fade into history just like CiX did. How to do the shepherding? Over to other readers!
In a similar vein, Martin’s work on Flock Together has been of tremendous value but at some stage surely we need to think of drawing it into and merging it with ACT, rather than continuing as a stand alone system? I don’t think that’s now, but a year or two hence?
“All in one place” – that’s the holy grail for me.
Pete
Martin – it’s good Act can import an rss feed, but that still doesn’t turn an FT event into an event on Act.
Chris – the one thing I know of that was deleted was for understandable reasons and my comment was more about the joke than a serious criticism and I should have made that more obvious.
Pete – abandon Facebook? Are you mad? All my actual real life friends are on there as well as the hundreds of random Lib Dems I’ve never met who I’ve friended because it seemed rude not to.
Pete,
Abandoning Facebook in favour of ACT is the online equivalent of abandoning Focus leaflets in order to concentrate on producing a snazzier members’ newsletter…
Unless ACT starts offering genuine incremental functionality that Facebook doesn’t offer, it will quickly become yet another site that needs maintaining, for almost zero political return.
Martin