Let me give you the verdict first: Ning is a game changer, as important to the mass adoption of social networking as Blogger and Wordpress have been to blogging. Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreesen's new network-building platform is so totally DIY your grandmother can go live in about ten minutes and has features that big corporations pay boutique design firms beaucoup dinero to build for them. It's infinitely customizable and the Ning "premium" offer is: $9.95 per every additonal 5GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth. For another $19.95 a month you can run your own ads. $4.95 a month to use your own domain name. $7.95 to take away the Ning label.
All of the features that you would expect in a robust social networking site are on the a la carte menu: individual user pages, blogs, forums, the ability to upload and share photographs and videos, a nice little "Chatter" box for immediate responses.
So, why would anyone-even larger business organizations-spend a fortune building one of these timewasters from scratch when the basic architecture of Ning is totally open to anyone who wants to customize it?
"Portability," says fellow Enterprise Irregular Rod Boothby. "The problem with Ning's closed social networks is that your investment in your identity on the social network is not portable," Rod says. "You build up relationships and contacts at one site, and end up having to reproduce it all at the next site. Or, put another way, Ning is just a mySpace page for a club. MySpace would only have to add that second type of page within their network to create serious competition for Ning. "
Not so fast says CEO Gina Bianchini: "You can feed and save all of your data, content, and application code off your network on Ning. This means that you could reconstruct your network elsewhere. Now, the "catch" is that the application code that runs your social network on Ning pulls primarily from the APIs offered by the Ning Platform. Our architecture is described here.
What about scalability? I asked Gina if it would be a problem if I recommended Ning to an association with 70,000 members. Her answer was, perhaps, not as reassuring as it might have been: "Nope, it shouldn't be J" but the infrastructure investment is there and I suspect scalability and reliability will no longer be major issues for Ning six months from now. If you trust Six Aparts to handle your corporate blogging and Google to handle your e-mail, you will eventually trust Ning to do your social networking.
The most conspicuous missing feature now is support. The online documentation is excellent but if you encounter as problem that is not covered it can take 24 to 48 hours to get a response. For amusement, I built a little private family site to connect me to my hillbilly childhood and invited a few relatives. But, after the first round of invitations, the "Invite" button stopped working. I sent a note to Ning support and so far it's been around 14 hours. Obviously, that's far too long for a large business organization to wait for an answer. If it's important to your organization to have immediate answers to technical problems, you shouldn't use Ning unless you have your own tech staff, some of whom participate regularly in the Ning Devlopers Network and know how to go under the hood to solve problems. For any personal use, and many business purposes (See Dennis Howlett's post here), though, Ning is an amazing achievement that can only get better. Maybe not really better than sex, but almost.
