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Gooruze Online Marketing Community

If you are an online marketer you might be looking for a place to connect and share ideas with other marketers. Gooruze was recently launched to offer a ranked advice community for online marketing professionals.

Parenting Social Networks: Parents Connect & Share Advice Online

Joseph Morgenstan once said, "Children are gleeful barbarians." So how do parents handle "gleeful barbarians?" Parenting is not an easy task but parents are no longer alone. With the web 2.0 movement there have been a number of parenting sites that have been introduced to help unite parents to do battle with the "gleeful barbarians." In this article I will profile a few of the more prominent parenting social network sites.

GotKidsNetwork.com a social networking site for people that have "got kids" is geared towards finding deals, nannies and advice online. Though the site has a lot to offer, I found the sites design of the site to be less than desirable.

Maya's Mom, Palo Alto-based a social networking site for parents, launched recently to to enable parents to connect and share parenting experiences and knowledge. Maya's Mom focuses on allowing parents to share information. The site is made up of parent submitted kid's activities,  a Q&A section called talk and groups focused on various topics. Maya's Mom was founded by Ann Crady Kennedy as the site gets its name from Ann's daughter. Also Maya's Mom recently received an angel round of funding.

Minti, a parenting social network founded by Clay Cook and profiled previously on Somewhat Frank, offers a place for parents to meet other parents in addition sharing parenting advice. Minti enables parents to create blogs, harness the simplicity of RSS updates, discussion forums and group creation.

MothersClick, a social networking site for mom's that may never be profiled by TechCrunch, launched recently with similar features to Maya's Mom. The site offers a question and answer section, groups that are plotted by location on Google map, blogs for moms and fun stuff which includes podcasts and other parenting related partner blogs.

ParentsConnect, a social networking site for parents produced by Nickelodeon, offers a local guide, message boards and video blogs for parents looking to trade advice. The site is lead and moderated by a group of 21 "host parents," who also share their own experiences in raising kids by overseeing the message boards as well as contributing to blogs. Seeking to encourage interaction, the company has already added blogs for users based on feedback recently during the beta test, and may also eventually give users the ability to sell items on the site.

Bottom-line: If you are a parent looking for answers, there are a galore of solid parenting advice options online.

Disclosure: I do not have any children and do not think they are "gleeful barbarians." :)

Minti Parenting Social Network Adds Features as Traffic Grows

Minti, the social networking site powered by parents and owned by Vibe Capital, has come out of beta as it continues to grow. Minti offers a place for parents to meet other parents in addition to finding and sharing parenting advice.

According to a recent Alexa report, Minti has been increasing the number of page a parent is viewing every month and has now exceeded its competition as shown by the graph below. Of course, it will take a little more time for Minti to catch up in rank and reach as it is such a young site.

Not only is Minti growing, it has also added the following new features for its new found visitors:

• Claim your external parenting blog on Minti (similar to Technorati)
• Member blogs
• Flexible RSS feeds
• Intelligent Search
• Tagging and Tag-cloud generation
• User generated content management
• Friends links between members
• Extensive tracking/watch-lists
• Discussion forums
• Member ranking technology
• Content ranking by members
• Group creation and management
• Private messaging
• Member rank rewards
• Administrator functions

It is hard to say which new feature is the most valuable. If I had to pick I would say the ability to allow users to maintain their own blog outside of Minti and claim them within Minti, similar to how Technorati handles blogs in the blogosphere, is a win-win for both user and Minti alike. It is an open and free approach which enables anyone with a blog to participate in the Minti social network without having it play within the Minti blogging system therefore I think it is the most valuable added feature.

Clay Cook, Minti founder and CEO, recently told me that Vibe Capital, the parent company of Minti, is eyeing other online social community verticals to target. I wonder what will be next?  I'll be interested to find out.