Anti-Social is a productivity application for Macs that turns off the social parts of the internet. When Anti-Social is running, you’re locked away from hundreds of distracting social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter and other sites you specify.
SNAPP is a software tool that allows users to visualize the network of interactions resulting from discussion forum posts and replies. The network visualisations of forum interactions provide an opportunity for teachers to rapidly identify patterns of user behaviour – at any stage of course progression. SNAPP has been developed to extract all user interactions from various commercial and open source learning management systems (LMS) such as BlackBoard (including the former WebCT), and Moodle. SNAPP is compatible for both Mac and PC users and operates in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.
Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free.
Agna is a freeware application designed for social network analysis, sociometry and sequential analysis. Platform-independent, friendly and easy-to-learn, integrated visual network editor, html output, free.
BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes which extends WordPress MU and brings social networking features to a new or existing installation.
ALT-J, Volume 17, Issue 1 March 2009, 33-47. This case study describes the use of a synchronous communication application (MSN Messenger) in a large academic computing environment. (peer support c.f. Twitter)
The Social Media Classroom is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more.
We have taken a sample of nine of these companies - Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn, CollectiveX, Me.com, PeopleAggregator, Haystack, and ONEsite - all of which provide free baseline services, and reviewed them individually below
NetDraw is a program for drawing networks. It uses (or will use) several different algorithms for laying out nodes in 2-dimensional space (3D will come later). Netdraw reads UCINET system files, UCINET DL text files, and Pajek text files (.net, .clu and .