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I first came across Ning.com last year, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t impressed. It offered users the ability to their own social network, so if you’ve ever had an idea for a social network, Ning wanted to be your platform. But after signing up and browsing through some example networks, I decided that Ning was an interesting concept, but bore serious resemblence to Dance eJay - the music production tool for people who knew little about music production.
But Ning just launched version 2 of their service, and it looks a lot better than the last. After receiving an RSS feed from TechCrunch, I’ve spent the last hour or so reading through all the latest news on the release, including catching up on the Ning blog and watching the video on Scoble. And from what I can gather, Ning is now essentially an open source platform for building social networks with limitless extensibility, but with the hosting and database management made much easier.
Things to note;
- You can use your own URL for a Ning social network and still have it hosted by Ning.
- The right to advertise on your social network can be bought for a flat monthly subscription, which means you’ll take the cash from the Google ads.
- The HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP is highly customisable, you can remove all Ning logos from the CSS, and the developer suite has some great user documentation.
- You can take your social network design elsewhere - but at the moment it appears as though the databases are off-limits.
- The social network browsing needs some serious work - I want to search for networks by popularity to see the most developed Ning networks, which at the moment I can’t do.
Several members from the TechCrunch community are experiencing problems with the service, including error messages when trying to upload new php scripts - in fact as I’m typing this I’ve just tried to login to the service and it appears that making the TechCrunch homepage has hit the Ning servers pretty hard. This could cause serious problems if developers have to work while logged-in to Ning instead of working locally, so let’s hope Ning can resolve these issues soon. Otherwise it looks like one to watch. I’d like to think we’ll see at least one sizeable social network grow off the platform.
