Ning, the Palo Alto start-up, has relaunched to let you build your own full-fledged social network.
Ning announced the launch three days ago, and since then, users have created 5,000 new networks, chief executive Gina Bianchini tells us — though is difficult to know how many of these accounts are like the ones we often create (to tinker with, only to never go back again). Ning now reports 35,664 networks, up from 5,000 a year ago. It is doing something right: Even before the launch, page views reached 20 million per month, twenty times the traffic a year ago, the company says.
You can choose whether your network is private or public.
Ning’s features are similar to the ones offered by competitors such as Yahoo Groups and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces.
Ning offers a big advantage over those others, though: The ability to tailor it to your own needs, right down to the code, if you want.
On Ning, you can mix and match features as you like, including comments, photos, videos, blogs, friend widgets, invitations, messaging, search, tags — the list goes on. Further, all of these are offered in a so-called open API, meaning that the source code is open for you to tamper with. You can modify it to create more options than Ning offers by default. Moreover, your network can freely exchange information with another network. We’ve summed up the main points, but there’s a lengthy (half-hour) interview with co-founder Marc Andreessen and Gina below. Andreessen, Netscape co-founder, is the main backer of Ning (it has spent about $9 million so far).
In the video, interviewer Robert Scoble asks the important question. “Why do we need more social networks?” He cites Marc Canter, who has a similar vision in his PeopleAggregator: “Every one needs a social network.” But Scoble retorts: “But I’m like, ‘why?’” Andreessen answers that just as people began to want their own Web sites or blogs in ways we didn’t appreciate earlier, they will want social networks.
Still, we’re left wondering exactly why, and whether it will really be Ning they’ll go to. After all, simple blog or Web site software, from Wordpress to FreeWebs, Blogger and Vox, are all becoming simpler and more flexible, letting you place widgets on those blogs or sites that offer the same sort of social features offered by Ning. And if you want to customize to greater degree, you’re probably serious enough to hire someone to do it, even for a few thousand bucks using other software — so that you don’t have to pay $5 a month to Ning in perpetuity, plus another $20 a month if you want to keep Ning’s ads off the site (so that you can claim your own ad revenue), plus another $10 a month or 5GB storage/100GB of bandwidth (we note, however, that this last charge is quite reasonable, since you’ll have to pay for bandwidth somehow).
8 Comments
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Mobius said:
Ning flat out doesnt work! Try for yourself
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Gina Bianchini said:
Hey Mobius!
Not sure what you mean as it’s up and running without incident today.
Here’s a summary of our first week: http://blog.ning.com/
Thanks!
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Marc Andreessen said:
Hi Mobius — please give it another shot — and let me know if you have any problems. You can reach me directly at pmarca at our company name dot com.
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Marc Andreessen said:
Hi Matt — thanks for your thorough coverage of our version 2 launch!
Re your question about why people will want their own social networks — the reason is simple: everyone has specific interests around which they connect and communicate with other people. Their family, their school, their church, their coworkers, their friends from high school, their political candidate or cause, and on and on and on.
Perhaps the biggest lesson learned since the arrival of the consumer Internet in the early 90’s is how avidly people love to connect with other people who share their interests — whether they know them in the real world, or whether they meet them online. I like to paraphrase the movie 2001: “The Internet is filled with people” :-).
In offering Ning as a hosted service that allows you to create your own social network for anything, we are doing two new things:
* Giving people that ability to create your own social network for anything — versus the AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve-style walled gardens of MySpace/Facebook/Youtube
* As you point out, as a full platform, we give people the ability to customize their social networks at every level from point-and-click feature selection and color selection through the HTML and CSS all the way down to the code (PHP, Javascript, Web services) — also vs the existing walled gardens which either don’t let you customize or cut you off at the HTML
Do we think that everyone is going to create a social network? No — most likely, a minority of people will create the social networks that everyone else will join and use. That’s fine!
Do we think that there will be millions of social networks created and used on Ning? Yes! There are already close to 40,000 on Ning along and we’re just getting started.
The biggest and most gratifying surprise for me since starting Ning is that almost anyone who sees the site has an idea for a social network they want to create.
Will there be a lot of social networks on Ning that get created and abandoned? Sure! Just like there are lots of abandoned web sites. To me, a large number of abandoned networks will be an indicator that we have met our goal of making it so easy to create a social network that anyone can do it in minutes — meanwhile, there are a lot of social networks on Ning that are growing rapidly. All good :-).
Do we think that people will only use Ning for this? Probably not — big markets draw competition — but we think we have a meaningful R&D lead (largely by virtue of the fact that we have stayed quiet for 2+ years, until the product was ready) and a really killer service.
The core idea behind Ning is that if you give people the capability to do something creative — your own social network for anything — in minutes for free, and with that capability they can satisfy their inherent drive to connect and communicate, then adoption will follow. And that’s what we’re already seeing on ning.com. Come join the fun :-).
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Phil McGarr said:
Great idea! Ning looks like a platform that might launch the long tail of social networks. Keep up the good work guys!
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Sergiy said:
Dear Marc and Gina!
Please answer me! I sent you the idea to translate Ning for russian users.
May be you did not get my mail.
Please tell me, how can I conect to you?
Thanks! -
Arifur Rahman said:
I think Ning is a great idea. We should remember that there are many small-communities. Users with very different interests.
Great work guys.
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eleathershop said:
Ning is one of the best social network connecting to people far and wid which self experienced.
