Ning v2 reviewed - create your own social network
When I come across an interesting service I usually try to find other similar services and do a roundup. There are too many new startups being launched every day, and one of the purposes of this site is to sift through them and give the readers only the best. However, in the case of Ning, it’s pretty unique in its own space. It’s a meta-social network, which means it enables users to create their own social networks and community sites. In the simplest of terms, Ning attempts to be for MySpace (but not only MySpace, we’ll get to that) what Blogger is for blogs. This approach definitely has potential, but it need not always be successful: remember Crispynews, the site that offered the users a way to create their own Digg-like site, which recently closed its doors.
I’ve stumbled upon my first objection to Ning in the very first step of using it. I’ve registered under the user name franticindustries, but after I’ve tried to create my own social network under the same name, it wasn’t possible because the word “franticindustries” is already reserved as a user name. This is not good. If it must be like that, users should at least be warned. I cannot even delete this user in order to create a network under that name, which means that I’m screwed for good. This is not a huge problem, but it’s a problem I’d like to see fixed.
Instead of franticindustries, I’ve settled for a simpler name: frantic.ning.com (join it, it’s fun, it has a forum which I don’t feel like setting up on this site). Creating your own network is as simple as can be. Choose a name, tagline, description, a couple of tags and an image. Then, drag the features you want (photos, videos, text box, RSS, blog, forum) and arrange them in a simple visual tool which represents your future site. Choose the appearance, you can choose from a predefined layout, customize it or create a new one. Set up a couple more settings (public/private etc.), and the desired questions which will be given to the members that sign up for your new network, and you’re done. All this is done very well - it’s simple, and I don’t think it will confuse inexperienced users, while pros will be able to customize their site pretty thoroughly.
The features that I’ve chosen - blog, forum, photos - all work exactly as expected. Actually, it’s all so simple to set up and use that I’ve immediately created another Ning mini-community for private use with my friends, which is definitely a great use for this service. Ning v2 has been in development for over a year, and it shows - I haven’t found any bugs at all yet, which is a rare feat.
*update: while the building-your-site phase is polished quite well, the networking is still buggy, which I’ve discovered only after I’ve invited some friends to join my network. For a while, all the subsites were unavailable. Now, the invite feature doesn’t work - and I’ve tried both ways, e-mail and through Ning. So, there is still some ironing to do for Ning admins before the service really becomes useful.
Does Ning lack something? Sure. With an application like this, you can practically name countless features it could introduce, and I’m sure it will never manage to please everyone. One distant possibility that springs to mind is RSVC (read submit vote comment) Digg-like functionality, which many users will surely appreciate. But at this stage, Ning covers the basics (and then some) quite well. As I’ve said, it’s not only a competitor to MySpace - it’s also a free forum, or a free blog. You can use as much or as little of Ning as you’d like to. And Ning pulls all this off while not overwhelming the users with zillions of features. So, while it doesn’t have everything, but it’s OK, they can add more stuff as they go along.
Visually, you can set your site as you like, but even out of the box it stomps over MySpace’s legendary ugliness which has always kept me away from the most popular social network. I’ve used one of the predefined layouts and I hardly feel the need to change anything, which says a lot since I’m usually a customization fanatic.
If you wonder what’s Ning’s business model, it’s visible right away in the right hand sidebar - Google AdSense. It’s there on every new created site. The option to upgrade to an ad-free, paid account (on which you can run your own ads) is a logical business option for Ning, and it’s exactly what they’ve done. The price? $19.95 per month. Read more about it in the help or at Ning’s official blog. All I can say that for beginners the price point seems a little steep, but if you build a social network on Ning and it kicks off it would definitely be worth it to switch to a paid account.
Ning will make an impact. It’s a perfect solution for users to create small social networks for family and friends, sandbox and experiment with ideas that might one day become large social networks, or just have fun. In the crowded social network arena, it’s the logical step forward. It gives you a lot of free, well built online applications while keeping it all simple enough for everyone to use. The only thing that worries me is this quote from the help:
“We don’t offer a version of Ning that you can run on your own servers and it’s not on our roadmap. Sorry about that. If running your new social network on your own servers is important to you, drop us a line and we’ll give you some other options.”
It means that you’re dependant on them. It’s not an open platform. If you build a successful social network using Ning, you live and die with Ning. When I started this site last year, I’ve tried it out on Blogger first. Switching from Blogger to my own Wordpress powered blog with my hosting and domain was not exactly enjoyable, but it was still a 2-day affair. You can’t really do that with a social network: it would cost you thousands of dollars to recreate the same functionality independently from Ning. So, while I do like Ning and I think that it’s a great and useful service, I would like to see them change that roadmap a bit and add the possibility of using Ning as a platform on your own servers.
February 27th, 2007 at 5:01 am
[…] Features « Visual search engine Quintura gets a new interface Ning v2 reviewed - create your own social network » […]
February 27th, 2007 at 6:22 am
[…] Om has some thoughts about the new Ning, and Scoble has an interview with Marc Andreessen and CEO Gina Bianchini up at Podtech. Frantic Industries has a good overview too. Technorati Tags: ning, socialmedia, Web2.0 | Share This | Sphere It […]
February 27th, 2007 at 6:42 am
I’ve tried to set up an customize but it just keeps freezing on me.
Has this happened to you as well in the process anytime?
February 27th, 2007 at 6:58 am
@Ali: it was down for a while. It works now, but it seems that they’re still having issues with various parts of the site. For example, inviting friends to your network doesn’t work at the moment.
February 27th, 2007 at 7:03 am
I guess you got in when it was up. Doesn’t load for me still.
February 27th, 2007 at 7:07 am
If you’re looking for an open-source, downloadable Ning, try People Aggregator.
February 27th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
We were down for about an hour this morning as a result of a bug we introduced last night as we were putting the final touches on the all new Ning. It wasn’t a scalability or load issue, just classic burning the midnight oil.
We’ve set up a place to funnel any issues anyone is seeing as they use Ning today so that we can rapidly respond, fix, and generally ensure an awesome experience on Ning.
If we can’t be perfect, then hopefully we’re at least responsive
February 27th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Thanks for the thorough review!
You raise an excellent point that we do not warn that the username and network name namespaces are the same — that if you choose “foo” as your username, that also eliminates foo.ning.com as an open for your network. We will take another look at the possibility of an alert for that during the signup process.
We do however have a good reason for doing it that way: there are a bunch of features (some of which aren’t out yet) where you want to have a single namespace. For example, if we ever provide full email capabilities, you’d want to be able to email either a user or an app — so you’d want “foo@ning.com” to be unambiguous. I’m being intentionally fuzzy on this because most of what we want to do here is not yet public but I think in the long run you’ll find that it’s worth the trouble.
The main reason we don’t provide software for people to run on their own servers is that it would greatly complicate our software development process — we’re trying to do something very ambitious purely on a hosted basis; to try to also offer that same functionality in packaged form would be extremely difficult. People who have tried to run large-scale hosted services will know what I’m talking about!
Finally, there are several different ways to import *and* export data — you can export all of your data (including user data) using RSS or Atom feeds (which we automatically generate) — or our web services (REST) API which is very comprehensive — or you can script your own import/export functions in PHP or Javascript. It’s as open as we could possibly make it — for, as you point out, a hosted service.
The pro of being a hosted service, of course, is that it’s two minutes in a browser to your own social network, for free…
Thanks
February 27th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
@Marc: thanks for the input. I’m not being automatically negative towards hosted services - I think they have great value - but I had to point out the possible negative sides of this approach. It’s good that you’re offering users a way to export their data, too. It’s important to send a clear message to your users: we’re here, we’re offering this, but if you ever happen to want something else, this is how we’ll take care of your data. Anyway, I wish you good luck with Ning and I hope we’ll see even more new features soon.
February 27th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Stan,
Totally appreciate you articulating your concerns. We definitely want Ning to be something people can come into easily and leave in the same way.
Thanks!
February 28th, 2007 at 8:01 am
[…] Additional Reading: Oatmeal Stout, Complexity and Social Networks Blog, Raving Lunacy, Marketing Shift, Mathew Ingram, Frantic Industries […]
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