CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Ning co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini started off her keynote speech at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference by describing Ning as the social network you've never heard of.
Unlike Facebook, which is more of a beehive with 100 million members buzzing around, Ning allows individuals and groups to create their own social networks.
Bianchini said here Wednesday that Ning is gaining traction, minting a new social network every 30 seconds. That's more than 86,000 per month on top of the nearly 500,000 social networks (65 percent actively used) already on Ning. Among those half a million sites, 3 percent are paying for premium services ($19.95 per month), which allow people to run their own ads and have their own domain. The company reserves the right to run ads on pages of the free service. Ning is launching an iPhone application this week, and also plans to support Android phones.
In her speech, which was devoted to showing off Ning, Bianchini compared her company's social networks to "hosting a fabulous party." These hot "parties" range from a social network for the music artist 50 Cent to one dubbed Twitter Moms.
She tried to make the case that Ning is a "platform" that provides creative freedom, whereas Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and LinkedIn are "walled gardens" that limit freedom. In this context, freedom is the ability to have more control over the user experience and data.
Ning CEO Gina Bianchini compares Ning social networks to hosting a great party.
(Credit: Dan Farber)Her "open" social network argument is not a very convincing to me, though. Ning users can move components around on the screen and choose from 50 design templates. Ning also has APIs that allow for data portability and access to member data. However, the primary code that runs Ning is proprietary. Ning does allow some modification of templates and code, such as the photo component, under an Apache 2.0 license. Programmers can change the way a photo is displayed or sorted, for example.
"Platforms win because they enable people to do things because they are programmable and give people control," Bianchini said. Ning and other more open platforms will make walled gardens obsolete, she contended. "It's not the case today, but this is what happens throughout history when people have choice." Facebook, MySpace, Google, and others would argue that they are platforms, which are defined by having a robust ecosystem and developer/user community. And they are open to the extent that they have APIs allowing access to their social graphs and other data. In addition, supporting open standards, such as OpenID, should be part of an open platform. But Bianchini said that OpenID is not user-friendly enough at this point and still has some security issues.
Overall, Ning is more "open" than other social networks in terms of the flexibility it gives users, but it serves a different purpose than Facebook and other social networks. Facebook's growing membership seems to appreciate the consistency of the user experience, the growing feature set, and the APIs, such as Facebook Connect.
Bianchini expects that there will be millions of social networks and that people will express themselves "for every conceivable niche, need, location, and language, with an infinite choice of features."
"If we do this right," she added, "it will happen on the Ning platform."
Clearly, something is happening on Ning. Whether it will become the next Facebook or MySpace in terms of growth and user activity remains to be seen.
Update at 5 a.m. PDT Wed., May 14: Andreessen's analysis of Google Friend Connect has been added.
Marc Andreessen sees a number of companies suffering from the same disease.
"...I think a lot of companies have what I call 'strategitis.' Instead of launching a product, which would apparently make too much sense, they come up with a 'strategy,'" he says. "There's a strong temptation for companies that don't have strong social networking franchises to roll out social networking 'features' instead of products, and in reality, consumers like to have products."
Marc Andreessen
(Credit: Dan Farber)Andreessen is referring to the launch of Google's Friend Connect, as reported by Betsy Schiffman of Wired.
Friend Connect glues together some emerging Web standards to make it easy for any Web site to add social features. Andreessen is co-founder and chairman of Ning, which allows people to easily and freely create their own social networks. Ning's platform currently hosts more than 260,000 social networks of varying sizes.
Andreessen is accurate in his categorization of Ning and Friend Connect. Ning is a finished product for end users, and Friend Connect is code that Web masters can apply to add a social dimension to their sites. It's also a way for Google to extend its reach into the social Web without having a leading social network.
They are complementary approaches, but Google's strategy appears to rankle Andreessen, even though he said that he would "support anything that creates interactivity or feeds" in the social space.
Instead of using Ning or an alternative service to create a companion social network for a Web site, savvy users could roll their own with Friend Connect. It might not be as full featured as what Ning delivers today, but if Friend Connect gains traction, it will gain features and thousands of applications.
Ning announced support for Google's OpenSocial APIs, and could support Friend Connect, which would allow users of Ning sites to connect with friends on other social networks.
Ning was founded in 2004 and has raised $104 million so far, including $60 million last month, giving the start-up a market value of about $500 million. Andreessen said he raised the large amount of money to support the accelerating growth of the company and to have the funding to survive what he called the "oncoming nuclear winter." In addition to a skittish economy that could go nuclear, Andreessen now has to worry about Friend Connect slowing his growth.
Update: In a blog post published on May 14, titled "Friend Connect, Open Social, Ning, and the Web," Andreessen offered his opinion of Friend Connect. He doesn't address his strategy-vs.-product remarks quoted in the Wired story.
In the following excerpt, Andreessen explains how Ning will support Google Friend Connect:
For Ning, Friend Connect is simply a new and better way to do the same thing with Open Social gadgets -- in both directions: out and in.
We will support Friend Connect in two ways:
Every network on Ning will be able to be an Open Social origin social network -- pushing out Open Social gadgets to anywhere else on the web that carry with them the social context and friends data from their origin Ning network. So, for example, the members of a backpacking social network on Ning can still interact as friends on any third-party backpacking web site, by publishing an Open Social gadget out from their Ning network onto that third-party web site. In short, people will be able to flow more easily from Ning to many other web sites without losing the social context of their Ning networks.
Every network on Ning will of course be able to contain Open Social gadgets published out from other social networks on the Internet via Friend Connect. So, for example, a group of friends on MySpace who all enjoy cooking will be able to travel from MySpace to a cooking-specific social network on Ning, via any Friend Connect-enabled Open Social gadget published from MySpace into that Ning network. In short, people will be able to flow more easily from other social networks and walled gardens into Ning social networks without losing the social context from those other networks.
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