What’s this Ning thing?

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Wednesday, 28 February 2007

Don’t feel like a ding if you haven’t heard of Ning – it’s the latest entrant into the social networking craze that lets you create your own social network on whatever topic you like.

Founded by Marc Andreesen, the man famous for bringing Netscape to the world, Ning is billed as a new platform for creating your own social networks, in effect letting you create your own MySpace.

According to Ning’s FAQ, Ning lets you “choose a combination of features (videos, blogs, photos, forums, etc.) from an ever growing list of options, you choose how it looks, you decide if it is public or private, you add your brand if you have one, and you enable the people on your network to create their own custom personal profile pages all in one great social network”.

Ning’s site tells us that once you're comfortable with Ning’s nifty Web 2.0 interface, which MySpace and Youtube users will feel at home with, you can create your own social network in a few simple steps in around 1 minute! All you need to do is to start by deciding what you want to call your new social network and choosing your own unique network web address. From there, you'll be taken through a few more pages to customize your new social network and that's it.

Your social network could be for fans of the TV show ‘Battlestar Galactica’. Or it could be about pottery, Harry Potter or anything else. It’s totally up to you.

The site will display Google Ads, but for US $19.95 per month, you can have those removed – and you can put in ads of your own, so if your social network becomes popular, you can earn money from Google Adsense or one of the other ad networks out there.

Choosing your own domain name costs US $5, but for those who don’t want to spend any money, there is a free option too.

Ning is the latest venture by Marc Andreesen, with the company and the initial site started way back in October 2004. Today, Ning is powering over 30,000 social networks, and the number is rapidly rising.

And interestingly, because Ning is its own platform, if there are features that you wish were included (although it is well featured already), you can even build those features yourself should you so desire (and want to learn how to do it).

It kinda sounds like a open-source-ish approach, but really all they are doing is embracing the user, and giving the user the freedom to customize their social network in almost any way they want.

So, this Ning thing sounds it’s got a bit of zing to it, and looks like it could well bring in the riches for the one-time king of the Internet, Marc Andreesen. Give the site a ping and see it for yourself!
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