Adrants Unleashes AdGabber, A Social Network For the Ad Industry

It's not easy to officially launch anything when you don't even have a logo. Now that we do, we are pleased to announce the official launch of AdGabber, a social network for individuals in advertising, marketing and media. AdGabber, which soft launched in May, has just over 1,600 members with about 40 new members joining each day. An offshoot of Adrants, we couldn't be happier with the growth and the activity we've seen to date on the network.

AdGabber offers all the usual social networking stuff like member profiles, forums, topical groups which member can create on their own, a video section that serves as the ad industry's YouTube, a photo section, a calendar section where industry events are listed, a music player, and chat feature, blogs for individual members and an RSS feed providing news from Adrants. In fact, the thing is so flexible, that anything at all can be added to the network such as daily or weekly survey, ad industry job listings and creative portfolios.

But that's not all. There's two Facebook applications that allow you to place videos and photos from AdGabber directly on your Facebook profile page and a direct connection to Flickr for those who wish to import photos into AdGabber. And, similar to Facebook's news feed, AdGabber has a Latest Activity ticker that lets you know what's happening on the network in real time.

There are also links to a Jobs section where those looking for jobs can search available positions and those looking to hire can post positions. A Portfolio section provides a searchable database of creative portfolios from art directors, copywriters, illustrators, photographers and many other creative types. Creative can add their portfolio to the section using a basic free service or various paid levels which offer more storage and place the work in the searchable database. Both sections are accessed via tabs at the top of the AdGabber site.

Every content area on the site has an RSS feed so you can grab individual parts of AdGabber and read them in your favorite newsreader or stream the content to your site or blog..

AdGabber is powered by Ning, an insanely easy drag and drop social network creation tool backed by Netscape Co-Creator Marc Andreessen. Everything is templated yet everything is extremely customizable and widgets make it easy to ad just about anything one could want to a network page. The people at Ning are fantastic to work with and have turned social network creation into something anyone can easily do.

The AdGabber logo was graciously created by AdGabber member Angela Glenn who, before you go all critical on her, followed my fairly specific direction that the logo's look fall within the same design family as the Adrants logo. I like it and I hope you do too. I am very grateful to Angela for stepping forward and offering her design expertise.

The purpose of AdGabber is not that much different from the social networks that came before it and the ones that will follow. AdGabber aims to foster communication and conversation as well as make it easy to discover, connect and network with others in the ad industry. In the video and photo section, commercials and ads can be shared and commented on. In the forum section, members can post all kinds of things from trends to creative commentary to requests for assistance in their job. In the Members section, members can seek out other members for skills they are looking for or just to say hello to an industry friend.