There have been some interesting reactions to Ning's new business plan. Last week, Ning switched from a hosted apps company to that provides an instant social network.

www.tribe.net did this 5 years ago. The New York Times says that Cisco is about to buy Tribe.

The problem with Ning's closed social networks is that your investment in your identity on the social network is not portable. For example, Filippo Corti has founded the a Ning social network called "World Wide Mac". You can see Filippo's profile here under PhilApple. The URL to the is http://macusers.ning.com/profile/philapple. macusers is the social network known as "World Wide Mac" and Filliop's profile (the /profile/philapple part) is unique to that group.

You build up relationships and contacts at one site, and end up having to reproduce it all at the next site. Tribe.net had solved this problem, but quickly all the "tribes" started to look the same. The only way to solve that problem would be to let people customize each of the tribe pages much the same way people can customize their MySpace pages.

Or, put another way, Ning is just a mySpace page for a club. MySpace would only have to add a second type of page within their network to create serious competition for Ning. Instead of just "Myspace", they could have "myspace" + "myclub".