“Dead networks mean that it’s super easy to create your own social network for free on Ning and that people are dipping their toes to experiment in this particular pond.” Gina Bianchini, Ning

This may be taking the old adage to have respect for the dead a bit too far.

Ning, a service whose tools I admire greatly, has released some figures on where their social network traffic is coming from.

Ning has reached the 80,000 network mark. They currently have 37% of their page views as a result of their top 200 networks. Their ‘active networks’ (no raw number given) represent 63% of their traffic. They have a third bucket that they a call ‘dead’ networks. No numbers given on those either. I bet its huge though.

I have a huge point of disagreement on the assertion that a large number of dead networks means that its easy to start a social network on Ning. Its easy to create an account on Ning. Beyond creating that account there are a lot of steps involved in actually creating a social network. Some of those rely on Ning’s technology, which makes it easier than ever to handle the technological portion of creating a social network. I have been trying out Ning myself so I am familiar with what their toolset offers.

There are some other intangible skills that are critical to starting and growing a social network. Ning can’t help you with that. Signing up for a Ning account and grabbing some domain real estate does not equal a social network. Only active communities are true social networks. The rest are merely digital squatters.

Arguments about the definition of social network aside I never think its a good idea to knowingly allow orphaned pages to reside on your community or network. A situation like that will most certainly gain attention from the spammer/black hat SEO crowd. Combine thousands of orphaned pages on the live internet with Google AdSense and you’ve got the Blogger splog debacle all over again.

The fun is beginning. I found a user on Ning who is the proprietor of five dead social networks. Looks like the beginning of a spammers paradise to me. I found another user that has ten dead social networks. Most have nothing but a description that includes a link to a web page with info on the alleged topic of the network. Gaming or just innocent experimentation? You decide. Either way, things like this are not good for the internet as a whole.

Search Ning and I bet that you will find more examples of user behavior that hints at the beginning of a much larger problem.

Ning as an internet service has a great power in their hands. Wasn’t it Spider-Man who said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I believe that services like Ning, including MySpace, WordPress.com, Blogger and any other service that allows users to create free websites, has a responsibility to insure that the web doesn’t get filled up with junk content. For years Google looked the other way while their spam filled Blogger blogs reaped them tons of cash from AdSense. It wasn’t right then and it isn’t right now.

If I’m running a service like this I’m putting tools in place from day one to make sure that people can’t take advantage of the system. The first thing you do is limit the amount of networks (or blogs or profiles) that one user can create without having to pay. You’d be surprised on how charging a few dollars can cut down on junk activity. When Craigslist started charging money for broker apartment listings in New York City the result was lower volume and higher quality of listings. As a bonus they got a great source of revenue.

If the funding is there, and for Ning et. al it seems to be, then hire some real people to do quality control. You look for sites that look like spam and contact the owner. If you don’t get an adequate response you kill the site and in some cases the person’s account entirely. When the bad folks know the ground isn’t fertile they will go elsewhere.

I’m going to add one final idea to this soliloquy. I’m completely disgusted that the world of web2.0 equates sheer size with value. Too many web companies love to trumpet raw numbers as if they are truly meaningful when it comes to the value of a business. Look at us, we’ve got 900,000 users signed up. Who cares? Tell me how many unique, real and active users do you have? Those are the numbers that matter when it comes to a web destination. How fresh is the content? How relevant is the content?

I’m with Jerry Maguire on this one folks. “…fewer clients, less money; more attention…”