GigaOM

yes, i want to build my entire social network on a platform that andreeson can sell advertising on. that way, i can manage to contribute something to andreeson’s financial well-being - seeing how he is strapped for cash and all.

Peter — $19.95/month removes Ning’s advertising.

I’m trying to understand why would Ning’s advertising clients would want to advertise on a Ning user’s social network unless this particular user’s soc. network has some niche content/big traffic./some value. something missing ??

I have a video interview with Marc and Gina about Ning 2.0 here: http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/technology/1372/social-networking-with-ning-version-20

Demo video coming shortly to http://www.scobleshow.com.

Vish — that is correct :-) — we are seeing that most of the social networks created on Ning are around some topic or location — whether it’s windsurfing or American Idol or Austin Texas. Ads are automatically targeted against those topics/locations (courtesy AdSense).

This is in contrast to MySpace/Facebook where the primary orientation is around personal profiles — which are harder to advertise against than topics or locations.

Ah - thank Go(d)oogle for Adsense. :)

Yes. And running Google Adsense is very clever as this will make sure that the ads are targeted and localized.

And no, they do not need many networks - they just need enough people not paying the price for getting rid of the advertisement because then they can make money from the niche content. :)

This is great as long as I can brand my sites.
I hope to move mediarati.com and veetube.com to it.

I started a list of all the Social Networking Applications out there that you can rebrand (white label)

Ning is on this list, which is nearly 40 companies

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/02/12/list-of-white-label-social-networking-platforms/

Victor — brand away :-). Let us know if we can help.

But what happened to the Maps? My old Ning site has a map mashup from Google - and my new one, which is geographically based - has no sign of maps at all. I need the map functionality. Where have the maps gone? (Marc?)

Ok, the homepage is up, the sign up page is up but it doesn’t progress beyond that.

“Problem Loading Page”

What gives? Did you pay your hosting fees?

Ali, I just signed up and created a new network in literally 45 seconds.

Are you using a homemade browser that you wrote yourself?

cool site. i hope they do well but it takes a lot of revenue to support 27 employees.

[...] TechCrunch and GigaOm wrote about start-up company Ning yesterday. Ning is platform that allows anyone, including novices [...]

I have used Ning - and besides the fact that it is easy to sign up - there is far more to be desired from a platform for building social networks. Even their stats counter was flawed. Everytime I played around with the code - the darn thing registered as a “hit” on my site. I like to see my social network get the numbers - but not by faking “hundreds” of hits.

A few weeks ago I read about an independent muscian who was ecstatic about the hits on his Ning site right after he set up on Ning - that’s is plain misleading some poor guy trying to make a living.

Sorry to harsh OM. The same goes to Brother Arrington on TechCrunch. As you put it - “Ning’s strategy at best could be described as quixotic.”

I see Marc & Gina are busy posting on the TC this morning - hope they sccot over to GigaOM and share their wisdom.

[...] has some thoughts about the new Ning, and Scoble has an interview with Marc Andreessen and CEO Gina Bianchini up at [...]

Marc states: “This is in contrast to MySpace/Facebook where the primary orientation is around personal profiles — which are harder to advertise against than topics or locations.”

Actually, Marc, this won’t be the case once such social networks; and really, anyone wise enough to use personal profiles; takes advantage of the patent pending (#11/250,908) paid match ad platform…where the use and availability of such personal profiles will enable advertisers; of all sizes, revenues and ad sophistication; to quickly and easily select and bid directly on the actual demographic and psychographic traits and characteristics (keytraits) of their most desired customers and clients.

Ning looks and sounds like an excellent product, and I wish you all the best in making it a big success…but tartgeting based merely on topics and/or geography…simply won’t hold a candle to targeting with personal profiles via paid match.

Believe it or not, Marc, even paid search could find itself in trouble…

G-

You are right that when you play around with your site on Ning that it counts as a page view. When someone sets up a MySpace page and edits it, MySpace counts those as page views as well :-)

We try to calculate only the page views that could result in advertising opportunities for either Ning or your own social network on Ning.

It’s pretty standard, but I can appreciate the fact that you wanted to just see page views generated by other people, not you. It’s definitely feedback we’ll can take and add into the metrics we provide Network Creators as we make them more sophisticated in the coming months.

With all of this said, I don’t think that we’re misleading anyone on metrics and think the musician who is excited about his own social website or network should be!

Steve,

By no means are we suggesting that we ONLY want to target based on topics or keywords. We agree with you that there’s a huge opportunity to combine targeting based on topics with much more sophisticated psychographic and behavioral advertising targeting.

Thanks!

Ivan,

What’s your site name? We’ll look into this asap, as the new release should not have effected your site or your maps.

Nice to see Marc and Gina participating in this discussion! Good luck guys.

Also nice to see that your teddy monkey engineers have exactly the Mac setup I have (MacBook Pro with menu bar on external Apple Display and Parallels). But seriously, why is the site down. Seems a strange time of day to take it down (11:30 -5 GMT).

Patrick,

You’re telling us :-)

It’s not a scalability and load issue. We have a classic launch day bug that we took Ning down as soon as we saw it, fixed and are now back up.

If we’re not perfect, at least we’re responsive!

Blog Traffic Crashes Site Launches…

Ning launches and then crashes as it becomes the hot link in the blogosphere, following a the patttern as the recent launch of Yahoo Pipes. …

Data Center Knowledge,

We’re back in action and, again, it was a stupid bug, not a crash.

At least we’re in good company :-)

Thanks!

For me, the question is whether Ning or anyone else can truly play all the way across the spectrum - from live social network in 45 seconds to really deep customization and scale (our focus at http://www.crowdfactory.com) is a wide reach.

will google text ads be the only way a business can reach out to the users of a specific SocNet on Ning.com?

Banner ads?

Hi C,

It all depends on the owner of that specific SocNet on Ning.

When the owner of the network pays for the premium service he is paying to take off Ning`s ads, what he will put as a replacement is totally up to him, banner, ad sense, partners videos on a html textbox, etc…

This is another example of “social networking features” becoming a key component of other product offerings.

We have adopted a similar approach at http://www.nexo.com and are excited to see users creating highly customized group websites. The social networking components are becoming an expected part of any website.

Gina and Marc

Can you post a pointer to the API docs? My developer juices have been tickled pink by all the hints Marc drops in the Scoble interview vid..

PLEASE? :)

It will be a great service when it will work. I’ve set up a site this morning, and paid for some premium features. After I went back to customize my site, the layout was all messed up. I did NOT try to change anything in the customization page yet, so the problem is not on my end. Anyway, I sent an email to the support team 5 hours ago and I’m still waiting for an answer as I write this.

I know it’s launch day but I actually paid to use this service and it’s not working.

Phil

Phil- We haven’t seen this issue but obviously we want to address it for you immediately. We’ll find your support email now and get you fixed up. Our apologies on the delay, we’ll have you back in action ASAP.

Kyle Ford
Product Manager, Ning

Hey Kyle!

Like I said on Techcrunch, I know it’s launch day and usually I’m more patient but the problem is that I’m so excited about Ning that I can’t wait to set up my new site. I’m sure you guys will provide a great service and you must have suffered from the Slashdot/Gigaom/Techcrunch traffic effect. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been reloading my ning page every 10 seconds to see if it was fixed :-)

Anyway, thanks for your quick reply and your support.

Phil

[...] ‘Democratizes’ Social Networks TechCrunch and GigaOm have long posts about the functionality and the strategy. Here’s a video [...]

Jacob,

Here’s the link to the developer documentation:

http://documentation.ning.com/

Enjoy!

-Gerir

Ivan — if you mean that maps aren’t present in the new “build your own social network” path, that’s true, but they’ll be back… would love any thoughts you have on what aspects of maps are most interesting for the kind of social network you want to build.

Maps continue to work in the older/existing apps same as always.

Thanks for the feedback!

[...] GigaOm and TechCrunch are abuzz today with news about Ning 2.0, the recently revamped tool to allow anyone [...]

Phil- Sorry on the delay…we’ve fixed the issue on your site, but please let us know if you have further concerns. Thanks again for checking us out!

[...] Ning Will Be Bigger Than Facebook Jump to Comments The blogosphere is buzzing today with the relaunch of Ning. It is a platform for creating social networks. Anyone (and I mean ANYONE) can within minutes have [...]

Thanks Kyle, it works like a charm now! I think you just have created the best social community sevice ever. Thanks again!

[...] Om Malik was more skeptical calling Ning’s strategy of building a platform for social media “quixotic.” …there are some of us who believe that the social networks are getting rapidly commoditized, and becoming what amounts to being a feature. [...]

Why “Simplicity Works Everytime”…

The problem is that as an industry, we have completely lost the concept of simplicity. We have become experts in abstracting any user request into a generic problem, and spend ages building generic systems that look great to us in our mental sheet of p…

[...] “The idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches,” Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Ning, a Palo Alto-based social networking company told the New York Times. Aptly put! (Read: Ning: let 000s of social networks bloom.) [...]

[...] will ‘fizzle or sizzle’ in Web 2.0. By day’s end, I’d decided Ning was a solid fit, social web platform for our future needs at Shaping [...]

My sense of the future is that platforms like Ning are enabling niche social networks to be easily created. It’s the next step beyond the behemoth myspace, youtube, etc sites not to mention too many teenyboppers. ;o) It gets tough to keep that sense of community (I have no sense with these sites) and the searching becomes problematic (too many videos, etc).
This wave of web innovation seems to be companies providing platforms, widgets and other tools to allow others to create, combine and innovate. I’m loving all the widgets, libraries and things that are enabling the creative process in all of us.

Ning is amazing. But people should note the key strategic change in focus that recently came about. It’s purely on social networks not on the older apps like classifieds, and the associated developers that like to tweak (although you can get access to the new code base the architecture has changed and there’s no docs for the new arch from what I can see - not sure if they’ll be created since there’s no dev focus anymore -Gina?).
With the new direction, as long as you can stay within the confines of the configurable properties without coding you are laughing (and hopefully the amount of configuration will only increase).
There’s still a need for the other types of apps like classifieds and others that can benefit from being cloneable and tweakable - hopefully someone will pick up where Ning left off…

Phil,

What is your site that you created with ning?

One feature of ning is the absence of some form of music player. Is this in the pipeline?

[...] for your own community, with no special expertise. If you want to find out more you can read what Giga Om, TechCrunch and Scoble have to [...]

If one uses Ning, whatever developed on Ning is owned by Ning and that code can be sent to any user of Ning. what if a startup wants to use Ning. we dont want others to use the code we develop. what if we want to use other servers like amazon s3 for some reason later. how hard is it to move it out to amazon s3. ?

Krishna

[...] Ning continues to grow more popular, i.e. people keep adding more social networks, the value per network is going to decrease. I have always believed that social networks are going [...]

[...] 100,000: Ning, a company that I have written about in the past has hit the 100,000 social network mark. That works out to about 370 new networks a day, since I [...]

[...] Demo of the new Ning - The Ning Blog Ning In Full - TechCrunch Ning: let ‘000 Social Nets Bloom - Om Malik on [...]