The Thing With Ning
By Rob Safuto on Jul 9, 2007 in Social Networks, Tools |
Roll your own social network service Ning has been getting a lot of buzz in recent months. They have a big name on their founders list with former Netscaper Marc Andreesen. They also have a boat load of great features that make it easy for just about anyone to create a media rich social network.
Like all new things in the social media space Ning is going through some standard phases of evolution. Take a look back at my post from earlier this year to see what those are.
I started using Ning recently so I could stay on top of all the features and possibilities. Things were pretty quiet for me as a user of Ning until I joined their Network Creators group. Since then I have received a half a dozen messages from people that were obviously spammers or get rich quick hucksters. These folks have found Ning so easy to use that they have set up shops over there for their get rich quick schemes.
Another issue that I’ve run into with Ning is the fact that their community contains a lot of inactive networks. Its so easy to set up a network on Ning that many people are doing the initial setup and then walking away.
I set up a site for music videos at http://musicbuggy.ning.com. I then wanted to see who else set up a music video site on Ning so I could network with other networks. I searched the term “music videos” and found quite a few empty sites populating the top of the results. I would think that Ning would have some sort of an algorithm to determine the quality of results returned by its own network search engine.
I think that Ning is a great tool for someone who wants to be able to build an online community very quickly. The features allow for unique branding and complete customization that some network builders are using to create great sites.
As a community of social networks Ning is lacking. There are a lot of orphaned networks. The SEO, spam crowd looks to be on to the possibilities of Ning as well. From my perspective there are two important initiatives for the creators of the Ning platform:
- Identify the robust networks and promote them in the search results.
- Create rules and features that protect real users from the spammers and SEO folks.
Athena von Oech | Jul 9, 2007 | Reply
Hi!
My name is Athena, and I’m a product manager at Ning. I’m really sorry to hear you’ve received quite a bit of spam from people on Network Creators. I wanted to let you know that we’re hard at work on new spam controls that we’re planning to release in the next few weeks. We’re also developing better ways to search on Ning, which we’re rolling out in the next month. This will make it a lot easier to find popular networks on Ning.
If you have any other thoughts or suggestions on ways we could improve Ning, I’d love to hear them! Want to drop me a message at athena at ninginc dot com?
Cheers!
Rob Safuto | Jul 10, 2007 | Reply
I look forward to the new controls. The unfortunate down side of creating a site that is really easy to use is the fact that the wrong users will try to take advantage.
Google has certainly dealt with this as a result of the explosion on splogs on the Blogger service. I see that you also have a new round of funding so it sounds like you’ll be able to make some significant investments into improving the technology across the board.