For the past three days I've been travelling to a roundtable in Palo Alto, California to meet with Ning, the developers of a platform that allows you to create any social network for any purpose. They brought together some of the most important and largest networks on Ning to solicit feedback, gain input, and tell us about the roadmap they're taking to development. And, I've got to say, their roadmap is both agressive and awesome.

Ning has allowed our client, The Pickens Plan, to create their network called Push on Ning, at a reasonable cost (for the premium services), with some awesome features built in. Now that Ning is moving towards the OpenSocial model, developers will be able to create some great applications that can be distributed to the more than 500,000 social networks on Ning. And, since Ning is designed to let you create your own social network (rather than a group or a page like Facebook and Myspace), you can add a whole level of functionality and draw for a client's visitors without having to even write a single line of code.

So check Ning out. I think you'll be surprised and happy that you did.