The Real World Change 2.0 series with Leslie Poston is an ongoing look at how people are using social media tools and their personal and professional social media networks to bridge the chasm from the Internet and social media bubble to the real world to do a variety of things to effect true change.

Change can come in waves or inch along in baby steps. When you have a great need for positive change, worrying about the level of impact your effort may have or the recognition it may attain for you only slows the change down. It’s better to think of it in terms of driving action.

People in the social media space are starting to take this innate ability of social media to drive action to heart. Often, social media lovers are accused of existing in a social media bubble made up of what non-Internet types consider inane activities like Twittering or posting to sites like FriendFeed and Ning.

These activities may seem inane to some, but they carry the power of immediate connection. We toss the word conversation around like so much candy, but the power of social media has never been solely about the conversation to me. Instead the power of social media is the ability to make genuine and valuable connections between businesses or people in a matter of moments.

Leveraging these connections to effect change offers us a power to offer help greater even than some government functions. Recent examples of social media banding together online to organize and help people offline happened this past weekend as Hurricane Gustav barreled down on the Gulf Coast.

Within hours of the projected path hitting weather sources, social media types like Andy Carvin have spearheaded efforts to create a network for those fleeing from the hurricane to get help if they need it, and for those headed that way to help to find out where they were most needed.

How did something that takes massive, well funded governments and government agencies days to set up take mere hours? Carvin used tools like Twitter and Ning and the social network of contacts he had built up on tools like Twitter to form a group of willing volunteers, with each volunteer assuming a task and running with it to the next level.

Carvin’s effort to help get a network in place for Hurricane Gustav (and later to have one ready for Hannah in case it escalated to hurricane levels) is only one recent, large scale example of the fat mobilization potential of social media. Social media has also been instrumental in finding people emergency housing in floods, helping arrested bloggers, tracking police raids at the Republican National Convention and more.

In this series I will be taking a look at our efforts for change in social media and the efforts of others in the social media space. I will be showcasing various ways we are organizing our massive networks to make things happen offline, and I will be writing pieces that help you mobilize your own social networks to make change happen for you close to home.

(Image via Flickr/ Ion-Bogdan Dumitrescu)

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SocialGO is a new Ning competitor that is currently testing in private beta. You begin using SocialGO by creating your own network, which features tabs for events, forums, and media (i.e. photos and videos). There’s also a Magazine tab, which is a different way of saying Blog; it allows group members to write their own blog posts so that any group member can contribute to the network’s public content. This is a good way of formatting user-generated content, as it’s very specific in its purpose and can easily be understood by most people running or participating in a SocialGO network.

SocialGO helps new users get the ball rolling by inserting a handful of news feeds in the News tab. This feature could be greatly improved if the default news feeds were relevant to the new group based on keywords and the network description–they currently offer generic news from sites like The New York Times.

The potential customization of the News tab also speaks to larger issues SocialGO has with administrative modifications that can be made to a given network. The ability to customize a network beyond its name and template isn’t a prominent task and should be addressed (it currently resides at a separate URL that isn’t clearly marked on the network itself).

Having a large set of customizable options for users and their privacy settings are imperative to network-creation sites, and once you get to your SocialGO admin, the custom options are pretty good. However, it’s important to remember that easily developed applications for a fluid and personalized experience are also key, as we’ve seen with the launch of sites like Soceeo and others.

It’s difficult to compete with existing social networks like Facebook, and additionally difficult to overcome the dominance of sites like Ning, without having a fluid experience allowing administrators to further customize their networks so that they’re tailored for administrators and end users alike. In SocialGO’s case, the more features it provides for its administrators, the better these administrators will be able to market their networks to their own end users.

Despite the version name (9.5) that sounds like a tired iteration which begs for the real makeover (10.0), Opera Mobile 9.5 beta is actually an important milestone for the only other mobile browser that doesn’t suck. We’ve talked about it when it was just an announcement; now it’s here for you to try it out.

Just like with every new version, Opera claims significantly faster browsing and improved standards support, so you can just choose whether you’ll believe them or not. But there are some other important innovations in this version.

First of all, Opera’s developer tool set, Dragonfly, is now cross-platform and better than ever. From the official press release:

“It allows developers to debug JavaScript, inspect Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the Document Object Model (DOM), and view any errors, making development for the mobile phone even easier.”

From the user perspective, the big novelty is the new user interface. The new one is a bit cleaner, and allows for cool effects like panning and zooming, while full page is now the default view. Additionally, you can now save pages and images with a click. Of course, the cool effects part sounds a lot like Safari; I’ve used both, and Safari on the iPhone still impresses me with its speed and web page rendering accuracy, but one has to admit that with this version, Opera has come mighty close.

Of course, have in mind that this is a beta release, so expect some bugs and glitches. If you’re feeling brave, go over to the download page, and tell us what you think of the new version.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Opera Mini 4.1 Beta Is All About SpeedShare Bookmarks Between Your PC And Mobile With OperaOpera Mini Launches ‘Dimension’ for Mobile BrowsingOpera Gears Up to Release Opera 9.5 Alpha, with Several UpgradesOpera Mini 4 is LiveOpera Mobile 9.5 AnnouncedMobile Browser Skyfire Gets $13 Million in Series B Funding

Source:Mashable!

Sports network weplay, which received nearly $2 million in funding earlier this year, has landed Pop Warner Little Scholars, Inc., as a new client. weplay will be powering the newly launched social network for Pop Warner, as a hosted group on the weplay platform (see it here). As the oldest youth football, cheer and dance organization, the necessity of an online community for connecting its new and existing members is undeniable in this day and age.

As there are a number of sports sites already oriented towards the youth, teen and college demographics, having an online community to enhance its website only makes sense. This network will be used for connecting not only the young athletes–coaches and parents can partake in the fun as well. So why not choose a more well known network platform like Ning?

weplay is a network that already had a focus on sports, and has a slew of known athletes already present on the site. Since the Pop Warner network will reside on weplay, there’s a mutually beneficial relationship that exist as a result. Being a part of the weplay network means that Pop Warner will have access to other weplay users. It’s a promotional perk that makes it a better option for Pop Warner. It also allows weplay to grow its user base fairly quickly. Gaining such clients for powering networks isn’t something that seemed to be on weplay’s initial to-do list, but I can’t say that I’m surprised to see the network move in this direction.

As far as sports networks go, the industry is still maturing and there’s plenty of room to still grow. It’s clear that the more established sports organizations are building out their online communities specifically designed for connecting various aspects of the industry, across a fairly wide range of ages. The white label solution is an easier sell than what we saw a couple of years ago, and we’ll continue to see the market expand as the online sector can be a great place for mass distribution of all media types.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:WePlay: High Finance, Known Athletes, Uncertain FutureWarner Drops Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against ImeemAnywhereCD, Warner Music Reach AgreementDailyMotion Partners with Warner MusicTime Warner Invests in Gaia OnlineWarner: OK, We Admit, Pirate Bay Cop Was A Little CompromisedWarner Sues Music Search Engine SeeqPod

Earlier this week, I noted on Twitter that every startup should have a press page. A page that includes: logos in multiple formats, short bio of the executives, photos of the team and/or executives, basic stats, contact information and links to other important information. Make it easy for writers to write about you. Check out my post about Peanut Labs - the logo in the post is the only size logo they have on the site. Wouldn’t it be great if I could embed a logo that was on a white background and much larger? What about including a photo of the CEO who I interviewed? Remember that you want to make it as easy as possible for someone to write about you - don’t make them do the work.

Another critical page should be a status page. This page should live outside the network of the startup and should house the current status information for the startup. I don’t care if it’s on a shared blogging platform like Wordpress or SquareSpace, it’s an absolute must.

Known for it’s downtime, Twitter has no public status page. There’s a developer Google group which appears to house some of the updates when the service goes down, but nothing public and so all of the Twitter users are left wondering what’s up. If Twitter had more communication when there are unexpected issues, I think users would be more understanding.

Ning has a decent status page as does our host Mosso. Simple pages that provide customers a "what’s up" with the servers and services they depend on.

Here’s a current example — apparently video message board Seesmic was down last evening. Investor Michael Arrington posted a semi-marketing, semi-rant piece about the downtime where he explains how important communication is between service and its partners. I assume when Mike speaks about his company’s usage of Seesmic, he is actually referring to the 800+ sites using the tool (weren’t they down as well???). Last week, Seesmic partnered with Disqus to push the Seesmic video commenting tool to any sites using Disqus’ blog comment replacement tool. I suggested that it was too soon for a major partnership. The unfortunate thing is that so far CEO Loic LeMeur hasn’t posted about what happened, why it happened and what is being done to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Loic did note that he is working to make sure "it" doesn’t happen again.

As soon as you notice there is an issue, stick it on the status page. It can be something as simple as, "Mooprz is currently down, we are investigating," with a timestamp and a contact form. Once the issue has been resolved, note that as well. After any investigation has completed, come back with an explanation.

I know that when your product is not functioning correctly, you want to get it back working as quickly as possible. The moment you take to update the status page will keep your customers informed on what’s going on and reduce possible emails as well.

In my opinion, having a status page is a sign of trust between a company and its customers. Just make sure to put the status page outside of your network so if the network is down, the status page is still up!

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White label social networking provider Ning has been offline for the last hour or more. Founder Marc Andreessen noted in March that Ning had over 200,000 networks. For the last hour, all of them have been down. Blodget pegs the company’s valuation at over $560,000. Is unplanned downtime acceptable for a company thats in the half-a-billion club? 

As of 7:05 Eastern, Ning shows an all clear message and the social networks are up-and-running. No update has been provided yet as to what happened. I have an email into Ning and will report back once I get an update on the reason for the downtime.

Partner Links
– Web Jobs
– NY Tech Directory
– CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group
– CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page
– Purchase an Apple iPhone