Ning.

The social website construction set Ning recently released a big upgrade and was profiled by Techcrunch. It was really slow for much of yesterday, so I didn’t get a chance to check it out. But I finally got in, and have some thoughts.

Ning combines two technology trends:

1. Web 2.0 social websites: user-created content distribution (YouTube, Digg [links as content], Yelp), and social networking (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster).

2. User-friendly tools for website creation. There are many desktop and web-based applications for creating static HTML websites, while for dynamic, database driven sites, there are server based content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Ning combines these two trends: allowing the drag-and-drop creation of dynamically driven websites that include social Web 2.0 features: member management, blogs, forums, photos, videos, ratings, RSS.

My initial impression is: wow.

The step-by-step process reduces many Web 2.0 concepts to features. You drag and drop modules right onto the page. The editing of a site’s theme is so simple it’s brain dead. You can choose from pre-made themes, tweak colors, and upload images. There’s an “Advanced” tab so one can add and tweak the CSS. I found the settings very intuitive and obvious to anybody who’s used Dreamweaver or even WordPress.

Check out this Battlestar Galactica “Ning” - a fan site for Battlestar Galactica, with a blog, photos, and videos. Also check out this Fat Cats Washington DC “Ning”. It’s for rating restaurants. Note how different these two sites are in design, and even functionality to a large degree, yet both appear to have been made largely made with the simple site creation interface.

Toying with Ning, I got the same feeling I had playing around with Yahoo! Pipes. Someone has taken something that was previous difficult for an average user and made it simple. Someone has also appealed to the creative side in me, except instead of creating content it’s a whole site.

What are the positives? Well, for starters, this opens up the creation of a social site to anybody with a decent idea. There are tons of cool subjects too “niche” to warrant their own business model. A user could create a family reunion website, where relatives can upload photographs or talk about their memories in a forum. Or, say you’re into some obscure subject like vintage Hawaiian dart boards, of which there are only fifty experts worldwide. You can now create a fun, social site with many bells and whistles for free.

Ning benefits as a huge “long tail” play. They probably hope to inspire thousands of micro-social sites where each has less than a hundred users, but added together they could form a juggernaut.

Second, judging from MySpace, people really like extensive customization options. Even if a site ends up looking like total ass, allowing that personal stamp can be another way to encourage community.

The creation of a social site network is also a way to get around the ever-growing complaint of “social site fatigue” - having too many Web 2.0 sites to keep track of, where every new one joined means falling off an older one. Once a user has signed up for one Ning site, it will be easier for them to participate in any other Ning-hosted ones.

What are some downsides? Well, if you make a Ning-hosted site, it seems you don’t own it or any of the content. Also, with the free model, you don’t benefit from any of the ads that are displayed. There seems to be a “premium” option with a monthly fee that allows “revenue access“.

The second downside is I have two sites stored on my own server. Maybe in the future, Ning will follow the open source model and allow users to install the software on their own servers.

In conclusion, Ning reduces much of what used to be a stand-alone Web 2.0 web site into nothing more than easily copyable features. That’s huge. Future business models might include building networks (as Blogger or WordPress.com are networks for blogs) or thankfully, technology that’s more innovative than just ratings, forums, videos, and photos. The bar has been raised.

Lastly, the most exciting thing about Ning is how it empowers users to create more than just content - now we get to create the sites themselves. I think a while back I imagined that user-created distribution could be one aspect of Web 3.0. I think at least, Ning is a cool attempt at Web 2.1.

Additional Reading: Oatmeal Stout, Complexity and Social Networks Blog, Raving Lunacy, Marketing Shift, Mathew Ingram, Frantic Industries

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