Drupal Gardens has moved into private beta, so private that I haven’t been lucky enough to get in the door yet.  But this new, hosted CMS, built on the forthcoming Drupal version 7, promises to be an interesting alternative for sites needing rapid deployment and a strong set of user-friendly features.

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert announced the launch on his blog, noting,

Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal so you don’t have to worry about installation, hosting or upgrading. Think of it as WordPress.com or Ning, except that it comes with the power of Drupal. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens should be a great tool for organizations that want to build social sites.

A post over at Contented Management provides a helpful, early review of this new Drupal service. I’m looking forward to the chance to give it a test run – should come late winter or early spring.

Ning, a fast-rising platform for social networks, grabbed a share of news last week by officially launching its Ning Apps service. Ning allows individuals to quickly and freely set up their own social networks on any topic, and has grown from some half a million networks when it first hit my radar about a year ago, to more than three times that many today.

Ning competes with Facebook in theory, but while Facebook, MySpace, and same are built around your personal profile – which is supplemented by friends and groups – Ning is all about niche groups.

This can be ideal for groups that want easy and versatile participation from all its members. Just a few years ago, setting up a site with Ning’s capabilities would have required lots of money and lots of time, a system well out of reach for most.

The tricky side of Ning (and for that matter, many social networky things that reside in the cloud), is that the data accrued in your social network is not easily obtainable by you, if you should ever need to take it elsewhere. And of course, you and your network members are subject to whatever user agreement Ning provides.

In most cases, the benefits of using Ning far outweigh these details. A neighborhood group, a small volunteer organization, devotees of a particular and unusual topic – all these and many more would be hard pressed to find an easier solution for communicating online.

But the introduction of Ning Apps further emphasizes the hazard (perceived or no) at play. Before a Ning network creator can install and make use of any 3rd-party application, you must clear this screen:

By adding this Ning App to your social network you are agreeing to share your information as well as the information of the members of your social network with the third party who developed it.

So whether your Ning network has 3 members or 3,000, you alone make the call on whether outfits such as Hulu, Ticketmaster, and PollDaddy gain access to the information in all your network’s profiles.

Facebook apps carry similar baggage, of course, but it’s easier to make decisions about personal data when the data is yours alone. The early press on Ning Apps doesn’t seem concerned about such matters, perhaps because Ning Apps disclosure isn’t particularly different from Ning itself. But I’ve noticed that fear and/or acceptance regarding online privacy varies widely. When developing social media applications or just catching the wind with a big sail like Ning, it’s best to remain thoughtful on those kinds of concerns.

As reported by CMSWire last week, there will soon be a SaaS (Software as a Service) version of Drupal, the popular and extremely extendable content management system. Drupal Gardens will be offered by Acquia, a commercial arm of the open source platform.

Drupal Gardens could have quite an impact. Many organizations and companies would benefit from using Drupal as their Web site platform. While installation of Drupal is quite easy (similar to WordPress and Joomla), customization and configuration to meet specific needs requires a steeper learning curve. If this new SaaS version can simplify life for many users, while retaining a good share of the extendability, Drupal may grow even faster than it does now.

I do have one quibble with the writer of the article, however. He states:

If you look at the open source web content management market, there are 3 dominant products: WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. These three packages are not terribly similar, but they do compete heavily in the lower end of the market. WordPress.com exists. DrupalGardens.com exists. And dear Joomla, when shall we expect you to join us?

Er, SaaS for Joomla DOES exist, in at least one place. SimplWeb has been providing a fully hosted and supported Joomla environment for at least a year now.