Marc Andreessen is probably not used to being late to the party. After all, in the 1990s he WAS the party: It was the IPO of the company he founded, Netscape, that launched the commerical Internet explosion.
After a complete transformation of his company's focus, and a year of beta-testing of its product, Andreessen yesterday officially took the wraps off of Ning-a social networking platform that offers blogging, forum building, photo and video sharing. Gee, how 2005.
Naturally an orgy of coverage and commentary followed. Digerati tastemaker Michael Arrington, who had characterized a previous iteration of Ning as a "dead application," raved about the new Ning.
After seeing a demo earlier this afternoon, I'm now willing to offer a full mea culpa. The new Ning is an impressive and useful service.
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.
The Red Herring carried the particularly snarky headline Ning's Backâ€"If You Care, but Alexandra Berzon's story was a balanced look at the Ning concept-allowing individuals to build their own social nets from scratch instead of just creating identities and groups within networks like MySpace or Facebook.
Anil Dash took the time to note that the Ning Blog is powered not by Ning but by Dash's company Six Apart.
Blogger Eric Rice complained already about trouble he had signing on for the ad-supported service blaming engineer-think. While the Raving Lunacy blog offered an interesting rant about Ning's copyright policy-users of Ning's ad-supported service grant Ning
a worldwide, fully sub-licensable, fully paid-up and royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, and create derivative works
(Terms are apparently different for the fully paid service.) So if you've got the next Harry Potter ready to go, don't publish it on your Ning blog.
Seems to me that the greatest difficulty Ning users will face will be driving friends, traffic, and links through their personal social networks. If you join MySpace, Facebook or business nets like LinkedIn you have a point of presence at a spot in cyberspace where millions of other people are already trawling for friends. With your own social network you'll have to work harder to send invites to the party.
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