Online live interactive podcast host TalkShoe integrated its service with whitelabel social networking service Ning. The two saw a perfect fit with one another, as TalkShoe last year decided to de-emphasize the podcasting part of their technology in favor of the live audio participation angle, and figured that Ning would be a perfect utility for retaining users who would return to participate in live discussions.
Today they announce that TalkShoe voice conferences and TalkCasts can now be more easily integrated into the Ning system. They're providing a number of new badgets and widgets to integrate community calling between up to 250 people at once.
I spoke to Chris "Chris24" Thomson to get his opinion of the new Ning collaboration features, and how they were helping his podcast, figuring that as one of the sites top TalkCast hosts, he'd have a good perspective. He informed me that he was no longer a member of the site, and he too had left over the constantly shifting payment system. I went down my rolodex of folks who I met on TalkShoe, and none of them were still using the system for their podcast. Chris did have one friend he knew that still used the system for his podcast: Rob White of the New Media Pro podcast.
Rob said that he hadn't seen much in terms of positive audience growth or even usage of the Ning system so far, nor had most of the other fellow TalkShoe users he'd worked with, but for Patti Serrano.