I would be wary to predict a mass exodus from currently popular social networks, but after playing around with Ning in the last few days, I'd say it could easily steal users from MySpace. Ning lets you create your very own social network, with custom branding, forums, photos, and videos. Everything is fully integrated and customizable with really slick looking themes that put less focus on individual user profiles, and more of an emphasis on group sharing and communication.
Compared to MySpace and Facebook, you still get to create and manage an extensive personal profile. The main difference is that Ning isn't just a network of profiles; it's a network of groups. Each time you join one of these groups, your profile can be customized with information that's pertinent to that group, making your profile a little more dynamic, depending on which users are accessing it. This allows more room for creativity and interactivity with other users.
Webware's Ning page
(Credit: CNET Networks)Adding media to a Ning page is really simple. Ning hosts videos and photos itself, with really simple uploading tools that let you upload content straight from your hard drive. You can also point to sites like YouTube, Google video, or Flickr to incorporate media from other sites, although you have to jump through hoops to use Flickr (other sites, like MyPunchBowl and SplashCast, make it much easier). There are two core uses for Ning: Mingling with large groups of people who share similar interests, and establishing smaller community groups for your friends. In either instance, you can sign up with your Ning ID, a login that's shared throughout the entire Ning network. It's a little bit like Blogger, which lets you contribute to multiple blogs with the same networked identity.
Ning offers premium services that come at a monthly cost. You can add your own advertising, use a custom domain, and bump the amount of storage and bandwidth for uploaded media. At the free level, each Ning networked site is given 500MB for private content and 5GB for public content, which should be plenty for most small groups but has the potential to fill up with large groups.
Ning has a really fresh feel about it. There is an incredible amount of customization and potential for people who want to create a community site, but don't feel like jumping through the hoops of buying a domain, purchasing a hosting plan, and finding someone to code the project. While you do have to give up some of the freedoms of running your own site, Ning offers a really great sandbox for the casual user, and those seeking more than a sea of profile pages.
Webware's Ning can be found here.
In Marc Andreessen's vision of the future, MySpace is going to face stiff competition from a million mini MySpaces.
One of the cofounders of Netscape and a symbol of the technology revolution of a decade ago, Andreessen is now backing a company called Ning, which launched a set of new tools on Tuesday designed to help even the most tech-challenged person build a social-networking site.
"(Ning) is essentially MySpace version 2," Andreessen said last week, adding that he is placing a bet that social-networking sites will follow a similar development path to that of Internet service providers of the 1990s.
"It's like the Web," Andreessen said, "After people get used to it, they want freedom. The analogy that I think is very relevant is that it's very much like the public's shift to the Web from AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. Stuff gets started and one-size-fits-all makes a lot of sense, but as people get farther into it, they want customization, they want control, they want flexibility."
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
That's what Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ning offers. Andreessen predicts that people will want to create more niche sites for people with similar pursuits and interests, and the MySpaces of the world will be too big to meet their special needs. MySpace and similar sites allow users to post their profiles on individual pages. Such sites control the advertising on those pages, as well as much of the technological functions of the pages.
Instead of just pages, the 2-year-old Ning is offering users the ability to build their own Web sites. Premium services let users choose their own domain name and give them control over the ads on their pages.
Ning also allows users to choose from an array of features, such as videos, photos, music, forums, profiles, and blogs. They can choose logos and decide whether to restrict access to the site to certain people.
The service, says Ning cofounder and CEO Gina Bianchini, allows users to select certain designs and move them to their pages in a drag-and-drop function.
"You don't need to know HTML," Bianchini said. "If you do know it, then you can do anything."
Anyone using the free service will have to settle for ads posted by Ning. For the right to go with the ad service of their choosing--or no ads at all--users must pay $19.95 a month. To use their own domain name, people must pay $4.95. For sites with lots of traffic, Ning sells additional bandwidth and storage at $9.95 per month per unit; a unit consists of 5GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth.
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