Are Web users going to get tired of paying for kitschy virtual items to pimp out each others' profiles? Social-site creator Ning sure doesn't think so. On Tuesday, it announced the debut of its virtual goods platform, so that network owners can offer virtual profile items for sale (much like Facebook does) and pull in half the revenue generated.
"From giving each other bloody chainsaws to shock troop dog tags, our members are having a blast recognizing each other for their contributions to the Lost Zombies Ning Network," said Scot Leach, founder of the "Lost Zombies" network on Ning, in a release provided by the company. "Creating custom gifts around our shared love of everything zombie adds a new level of fun and excitement for our members."
Some analysts have estimated that the virtual goods market will hit $1 billion this year.
Participating networks' members can buy the gifts for one another and they'll be displayed on the recipient's profiles. Payments are processed with PayPal, and then revenues are split 50-50 between Ning and the site owner after PayPal's transaction fees are taken into account. But while Ning site owners can design the gifts themselves, they won't be able to price them--all will cost 75 "credits," or approximately $1.50--something that might not go over so well with site owners who want to sell really expensive bloody chainsaws.
Ning, which says that a total of 1.6 million "networks" have been created with its technology and counts 36 million active users overall, launched a third-party applications platform last month.
The company was co-founded by Netscape creator Marc Andreessen, who justified a $60 million funding round last year by saying that the company was preparing for an economic "nuclear winter." Or maybe a zombie attack.
This post was expanded at 1:07 p.m. PDT.
Ning, the service that lets you build your own social network, on Thursday officially launched a platform that gives users access to more than 90 embeddable applications and widgets for things like collecting donations or selling tickets.
The public launch of Ning Apps has been a long time coming. It went into a private beta in May and Ning was one of the original launch partners for the OpenSocial platform, on which Ning Apps is based.
The platform gives the 32 million users of the 1.5 million Ning-built social networks even more customization options. For example, the company points out that a band-oriented Ning social network could embed the Sellit online store to sell merchandise, Ticketmaster or LiveNation apps to sell tickets, or Qik to stream mobile video. Similarly, an activist site could embed BlogTalk Radio to host a live radio show or PollDaddy to gauge member interests.
Ning App only furthers users' ability to customize their sites and thus drive traffic, no doubt an important component of Ning's business plan.
Forbes says the company, co-founded by Silicon Valley pioneer Marc Andreessen, is valued "at a lofty $750 million following a $15 million investment in July from Lightspeed Venture Partners."
Correction: The number of Ning users has been updated in this post. Ning has 32 million users. 1.5 million social networks have been built to date on the Ning platform.
Since OpenSocial's release in 2007, a variety of applications have been developed through the program. While some of the applications are built for MySpace, and others are also available on Facebook--which has kept its distance from the Google-led platform--the majority of them unfortunately are designed for less popular social networks, such as Hi5, Orkut, and Ning.
Some OpenSocial apps, regardless, are worth trying out. From games to profile add-ons, I've found eight that I deem worth adding to a compatible social-network account.
8 OpenSocial apps
Centrl Centrl is a chat tool that enables you to communicate with friends across many social networks. It can be installed on MySpace, Orkut, Ning, Hi5, and elsewhere. Once installed, you can engage in a public chat with anyone or talk to individuals on a variety of social networks, including Facebook. The app also determines your location so you can find folks in your area.
I found Centrl chat to be simple and appealing. But considering that so many social networks have their own instant-messaging tool, don't expect Centrl to gain too much traction anytime soon.
Centrl shows you who's on across the world.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)MiniTweet MiniTweet is a simple OpenSocial app. The tool adds a small Twitter update box to your MySpace profile. You can pick a title and input your user name. MiniTweet then displays all your recent Twitter updates on your profile. At any time, you can view your Twitter page by clicking on your MiniTweet title. You can't update your status in the app, but it's still worth checking out.
MiniTweet displays your Twitter updates.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Social-network creator Ning is letting those networks get even more customized: it's unveiled Ning Apps, the company's full plunge into the developer platform craze. It goes into private beta on Thursday and will launch in full later in May.
This announcement is a long time coming, as Ning launched a limited application gallery in October--and that was still nearly a year after it was among the original launch partners for the OpenSocial developer application consortium.
There are a couple of things that make Ning Apps different from the social platforms found on the likes of Facebook or MySpace. While the earlier, limited array of apps offered on Ning was strictly for members to embed on their profiles, the formal Ning Apps product is geared toward the creators and administrators of Ning social networks. They can add an application--from a cash donation widget for a nonprofit network, to a ticket sales app for a band's fan page, to a live video stream of what-have-you--and it'll mesh right into the social network.
"A Ning network creator selects one of these apps, that functions basically like a full-fledged feature on the social network, and by choosing to install an app the app has a presence on the front page of the social network," Jason Rosenthal, Ning's senior vice president of business operations, told CNET News. "It gets a dedicated tab within a social network, and perhaps most interestingly, by default the app is installed on every (member's) profile page of that social network."
Ning, co-founded by Silicon Valley notable Marc Andreessen, doesn't yet make any extra revenue off Ning Apps, even though the possibility is there for the social network to take a cut of financial transactions or ad revenue. "It does open an interesting new monetization opportunity for us," Rosenthal said, "but not today."
The company announced last month that 1 million social networks had been created on its platform.
Sometime on Thursday, the one millionth site was created on Ning, the build-your-own-social-network company that was co-founded by Silicon Valley baron Marc Andreessen. It launched just over two years ago.
Ning now has 22 million registered users, about 6.1 million of whom are considered active. Out of the million networks, about a fifth are currently active.
While these numbers are still small compared with the likes of Facebook (on whose board Andreessen sits) it's impressive considering Ning lost 20 percent of its page views in December when it chose to shut down networks containing porn and other adult content. Traffic had recovered in February, CEO Gina Bianchini told CNET News.
Bianchini added that much of Ning's growth comes from networks that aren't ultra-niche, but are focused on something that has a rabid and vocal following. Case in point: thetwilightsaga.com, an official fan site for the vampire-themed book series that converted to a Ning network shortly after the first book was turned into a hit movie. In two months, 94,000 people joined, she said.
"I believe that no one is doing and thinking about graphing interests and passions, and thinking about people as their interests and passions, except us," Bianchini told CNET News.
There's no more room for smut and naughty bits on build-your-own social network service Ning, according to a post on the company blog. Ning has announced that it will shut down its "Red Light District" of adult content, and on January 1 will formally ban it.
"We are exploring ways for adult networks that will no longer be available on Ning to export their content in addition to their members," the post by CEO Gina Bianchini read. The reasoning, she explained, is that it's costly and problematic--something you just can't deal with in a recession.
Advertisers don't like it, Bianchini said. "Our ad partners aren't big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue," she explained. "We don't want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that's where this is heading."
And if legal adult-content networks are allowed, the illegal ones invariably weasel their way in, Bianchini said, and that means more work for a small team. The number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices is also higher for adult networks: "Compared to our other social networks on the Ning Platform, the additional work created by adult networks alleged to have violated the copyrights of others is enough for us to discontinue adult networks in favor of investing time and energy in growing the Ning Platform from here," Bianchini wrote.
Ning isn't the only site to be cracking the whip on porn. YouTube, owned by Google, said on Tuesday that it's "tightening the standard for what is considered 'sexually suggestive.'"
Bianchini co-founded Ning with Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and famously raised a $60 million round of funding in anticipation of a "nuclear winter." Guess that was a good move.
Social-network builder Ning has deployed its support for developer applications for OpenSocial, something that it has been planning to do since Google kick-started the open-source project nearly a year ago. (It is now an independent organization.)
A Ning profile with the OpenSocial 'BuddyPoke' app added.
(Credit: Ning)As part of the launch, a directory of 30 applications will be available for Ning members to embed in their profiles, which they use for any of the hundreds of thousands of networks created with Ning. They'll have variable "skins" to adopt the design of the profile around them and blend in, the company has said. Incorporation into the OpenSocial app directory on Ning will be selective, so it won't be a developer free-for-all.
A few OpenSocial apps had gone live on Ning in beta over the past year, including one from social music service Last.fm (which is owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive).
You still can't embed OpenSocial apps on Ning networks, just profiles--but that will change, CEO Gina Bianchini said to CNET News, when future versions of OpenSocial (the current one is 0.7) are developed. "In its first incarnation, it looks and feels a lot like what you'd be doing on a MySpace profile or on a Facebook profile in terms of adding apps," she explained, "but what's unique about us is that we have half a million social networks and they'll want an app for their network as well."
From the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Google engineer Kevin Marks praised the incorporation of Ning into OpenSocial, which he helped build. "The nice thing about Ning is that we're going from about 100 social networks to about 500,000 social networks," Marks said to CNET News.
The question still remains, though as to whether Ning would opt to support Facebook applications--still not compatible with OpenSocial--the way social network Friendster has.
"We'd love to support Facebook apps," said Bianchini, who co-founded Ning with veteran entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. "Right now, Facebook hasn't neccessarily set it up in a really clear, programmatic way...(Facebook) has talked about it, then came back from it, and it's a little bit in limbo right now in terms of really what and how they would want other social networks to support Facebook apps."
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.
As has been repeatedly rumored, Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen will be taking a seat on Facebook's board of directors. In a press release issued Monday afternoon, the veteran entrepreneur--co-founder of Netscape, former CTO of AOL, and now co-founder of social site Ning--was announced as the board's fourth member. He'll join Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as well as two of the company's early investors, Accel Partners' Jim Breyer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, now of the Founders Fund and Clarium Capital.
"Marc is an industry leader, and we're fortunate to have him join our board," Zuckerberg said in the release issued Monday.
Not surprisingly, the 24-year-old hopes that Andreessen can act as a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi figure. "He has experience that is relevant to Facebook in so many ways: scaling companies that are experiencing extraordinary growth, creating successful technology platforms, and building strong engineering organizations. I know Marc will be a great mentor to me and our leadership team," Zuckerberg said.
Perhaps most interestingly, Facebook's release refers to Ning as "a complementary platform to Facebook." When rumors began to swirl about Zuckerberg wanting Andreessen on his board of directors, some critics suggested that he'd have a conflict of interest as co-founder and chairman of a potential rival. But Ning is more a Web 2.0 spin on the discussion forums of old (say, 1998), allowing members to create micro-niche communities centered around discourse. Facebook, for many, is the 21st-century edition of an address book: highly effective at what it does, but centered on maintaining connections rather than letting interest groups flourish. Facebook's own "Groups" feature, for example, is very stripped-down compared with Ning.
And it doesn't look like Andreessen sees Facebook as the competition either. "Facebook is one of the most innovative companies on the Web and it's an honor to join the board," he said in the statement. "I'm looking forward to helping the team as Facebook continues to grow."
Short version: Wetpaint might be one to watch.
Long version: TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. It's Wetpaint, a Seattle-based service we haven't heard a whole lot from lately. The reason, Arrington says, is that it's positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.
The easy-to-create wiki service pulled in 3 million page views in March, according to ComScore numbers, compared with 3.8 million for Ning, the well-funded social-network creator helmed by Marc Andreessen. Wetpaint also claims 900,000 wikis have been created, far more than the 263,000 that Ning counts (though who knows how many of those are legitimate and/or active). While Ning's way ahead in traffic, a few months ago Wetpaint released a set of features to ramp up social-networking activity on the site, with friends lists, news feeds, member profiles, and Yelp-style "compliments" now in the mix.
There are also 70 "sponsored" Wetpaint wikis, like the fan wikis created by cable network Showtime for each of its programs.
