Ning - R.I.P.?

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1. Alex Bosworth
   

   January 20th, 2006 at 1:28 am

   There’s a lot of development on the project as well.

   ‘hosted application website’ no one seems to be able to make that work, especially given that a lot of people aren’t even willing to let someone host their blog.

2. aaron
   

   January 20th, 2006 at 2:30 am

   straight out of the box this seemed like a bad situation because you can’t very well take your Ning application public, or sell it to yahoo so if you need to pretty much be a developer to use their tools, why would you develop on top of them? This isn’t even that compelling to an “regular” person I’m guessing.

3. Alasdair Allan
   

   January 20th, 2006 at 3:04 am

   I have to agree, right at the start I didn’t really understand what they were trying to do, once I figured that out I wasn’t sure why they were trying to do it. If you could already program, why would you use Ning instead of rolling your own? If you couldn’t what did they offer you to create unique content? I’ve got to admit, I think these guys are going to be one of the first casualties of the Web 2.0 bubble…

4. soobrosa
   

   January 20th, 2006 at 4:41 am

   yep, they had some downtimes, but IMHO they try to do their best. okay, I had to learn a bit PHP and XHTML, but these days we happily run our stuff (http://newfocus.hu/) on their infrastructure (http://newfocus.ning.com/)

5. vincent
   

   January 20th, 2006 at 4:54 am

   I totally agree with the different problems presented here. I developed a localisation of AnytownMarketplace (a craiglist clone) in french but :
   * The URL must be http://blablabla.ning.com

   * My users have to login (in english)

   * I had to modifiy the source code of many files (I have very little knowledge of HTML and PHP)

   * I’m not interested in sharing tags with Palo Alto restaurants reviews or Kitten wars…

6. Alan Wilensky
   

   January 20th, 2006 at 7:00 am

   I am almost sure that uber techfox Amy Hoy, a leading light in the Ruby community is working there. Or if not working there contracts - if she is involved, it ca only get better.

7. Hyther
   

   January 20th, 2006 at 8:14 am

   I agree with Mike completely on his comment that 99.9% of the Internet population is looking to create new application from scratch. Home users or small business people want to build applications to their situated needs, their long tail of applications. They want to build apps from scratch in minutes with just few mouse clicks and go live without any coding of PHP or HTML knowledge. They hate to get help from developers.

   Glad that our Zoho Creator ( http://www.zoho.com/creator ) is heading at right direction. We will be launching the beta in another few weeks

8. Richard
   

   January 20th, 2006 at 8:33 am

   Before reading the entire post, I visited the ning website and thought WOW this is what i’ve been looking for, but after reading a bit, it did turn me off that they host your site. I would like a little more power also (wouldn’t we all) but have my own users and change the pages how i want them. I would love to have some of these apps placed inside my own site for my users, but I don’t want the site to be the app.

9. Kevin Burton
   

   January 20th, 2006 at 8:36 am

   “At first they called it 24hourLaundry and no one knew what Ning would be. With the benefit of hindsight, this looks silly. No one was rushing to launch anything similar, and in fact telling users about their plans and getting feedback would have helped them build a better product.”

   It’s not hindsight. I was telling everyone who would listen that this is a stupid idea.

   You have t REALLY think about the whole stealth-mode issue in today’s day and age.

   95% of the time it’s a bad idea and a sign of dumb things to come.

   Then there’s vaporware. I won’t go into that right now… maybe I’ll blog it.

10. Mike D.
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 9:36 am

    Stealth mode had nothing to do with the success or failure of this service, imho. To me, it’s more about market size… which you spelled out with your 99.9% calculation.

    1. Take the whole universe. (100%)
    2. Subtract people who don’t use the web for anything but the standard stuff. (90%)
    3. Subtract people who aren’t interested in create their own social apps/mashups. (9%)
    4. Subtract people who DO want to create this stuff but on their own terms (.9%)

    … and that’s how you get to the .1% number.

    To me, the important part is item #2, and that’s what makes me skeptical about a whole lot of new ventures aimed at pleasing techies and not the general public (Ning aside).

11. Johnvey Hwang
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 10:06 am

    A major component to its failure was the hype surrounding 24Hour and its supposed super-stealth skunkworks operation that was going to change the web. When Ning was made public, my first reaction was, “Are you kidding me? Its just a PHP host!”

    As Arrington has mentioned before, you get one and only one impression to make with the early adopters. This one was pretty bad.

12. Chris Messina
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 10:12 am

    I actually talked to Yoz and Brian from Ning at Mash Pit… they pitched in on lunch but couldn’t stay the whole day to participate in the hacking, which was unforunate since Yoz said that Ning might really have been useful in the work that resulted! Maybe next time…

    Originally Yoz contacted me in response to a shot I took across their bow when I announced Mash Pit. I didn’t really expect a response, but it did give me the opportunity to hear his side of things.

    So I think Michael’s criticisms are actually pretty well placed — but I can sympathize with Ning. And I’m not interested in becoming a platform apologist, but c’mon, both Flock and Ning’s visions are long term. We also released early to get feedback on what we had at the time. To quote that mountain of a man Rumsfeld, we went out with the app we had, not the app that we wanted.

    And to this day, we’re still building on our visions — incrementally, adding things here and there, making downpayments on the long term visions that still drive the development of our apps.

    Michael, I have to ask — in all sincerity, are the current expectations on timeframes for building platforms reasonable? Did you really expect an entire application platform to be built, soup to nuts, in just over three months? You’re familiar with the issues we’ve had trying to build a cross-platform, open source browser on a platform we’re purposely not forking. I can imagine that startups that aren’t G-sized and aren’t just building another also-ran Rails app will need more time to execute.

    Call in question the communications, the messaging, the schedule of features — everyone could learn something from Tara — but I think hinting at the demise of Ning now is less useful than focusing on the more useful criticisms you’ve raised and how Ning can improve on them. I’ve talked to Yoz again and hopefully he can answer some of the things you’ve brought up. Otherwise — it’s good to keep us honest!

13. Ryan Williams
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 10:22 am

    The first reason you give isn’t, in my view, a killer as anybody building anything today needs programming skills. Building tools for non-programmers is a tough business to be in. I don’t think it’s very compelling for non-programmers anyway (as aaron pointed out in comment #3).

    The third reason is right on. I was going to build something on Ning, but if they control my users and don’t allow any possibility of monetizing, why waste the effort.

14. Mathew
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 10:39 am

    It is not trivial to create tools that allow non coders to code.
    Charles Simonyi himself, has been going down this rathole for several years with http://intentsoft.com/
    I don’t imagine that the Ningies have anything on Charles in the brainpower department.

15. Jeff Gerter
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 11:22 am

    Did you see their blog post today? I looks like they are directly addressing this post. http://blog.ning.com/2006/01/s.....ing_a.html

16. Jeff Gerter
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 11:25 am

    this is funny - your traffic to your blog is like six times their traffic. http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....ng.com#top

17. Gina Bianchini
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 11:48 am

    Aside from the harshness of this post which was probably unintended, I would like to address the misconceptions here.

    Ning is an online platform for effortlessly creating social web apps for free. Without any coding experience, you can take any of the thousands of active social web applications on Ning today and make them your own in a few easy clicks. You can’t do this anywhere else on the Internet today.

    As a developer who does know how to code, there is no easier place to create and run your own web app, social or otherwise, as there are no downloads required, no databases to manage, and no sysadmin headaches. 95% of what you’d have to do to build a web app is already done.

    You can run your own ads, map your own domain, and protect your source code if you’d like. These are new services we rolled out in December that you can see if you are a signed in user. We’ll be making them more obvious to the wider public in the coming weeks.

    We support external web services from, as Michael mentioned, from Google Maps, Amazon, Yahoo Maps, Flickr, Yahoo Search, and Gmail. Moreover, because we are an open platform, you can also upload existing PHP modules for other web services, like eBay or Technorati, into any web app on Ning.

    As for communicating with our users, we are constantly working to improve our service and sometimes err on the side of letting it speak for itself. To this end, we’ve been quietly working on:

    1. A major redesign of the entire service to make it friendlier and what we offer more obvious
    2. Features to enable non-coders to customize social apps and build new social apps from scratch using components
    3. Performance improvements to make Ning even faster and more scalable
    4. Support for Ruby and other languages

    We haven’t been as obvious with some of this stuff as we should be and perhaps you have to sign in to your account to see a lot of these features, but they are all there. We’ve just posted this morning a summary of our new features at our blog: http://blog.ning.com and we’ll continue to engage in active conversations with our users and anyone else who is interested in what we offer.

    Feedback and a conversation is always good, even if we’re on the receiving end of some frank opinions. Thanks!

18. aaron
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 12:11 pm

    Is it possible that by being so unfocused, this was one of the problems? A casual user visiting your site wouldn’t know where to start I would imagine. I think I can see the value in Joe Schmo the college student setting up a photo rating app for his friends, or a family setting up some group blog, etc- but at first glance there is just way too much to do it seems.

    I also think you would be best off dropping the whole developer element, because as I mentioned previously, anyone with the skills and ambition to make a popular “app” would likely do this on their own. People who code in Ruby especially have no need for this kind of platform.

    Best of luck- could be cool, but I would reconsider who you should be aiming at- and how to get there.

19. aaron
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 12:19 pm

    at second glance, your homepage does not seem to be focused on developers, which is good- but as Michael points out, you need to actually have some development experience to make it all work.

    one thing to watch out for- a lot of the apps seem very temporal. things like “confess” and “how much do I rock” get boring before I even decide to participate. having lots of these could actually bring down your brand I would guess- I would focus on valuable apps that have some sort of staying power. in this case, letting people do whatever they want isn’t necessarily the best solution

20. Gina Bianchini
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 12:33 pm

    Aaron,

    Fair points regarding our messaging. We can and should be more precise. We’ve been working on it and will being rolling out a new interface to specifically address your points in the next few weeks.

    Regarding developers, while we definitely want to empower non-coders to be able to create their own social web apps painlessly, we also think that for there are those developers out there who might find value in an online platform that doesn’t require downloads, database management, or sysadmin headaches. We might be wrong, we still think that there is value in giving that a shot 

    Thanks again for the comments and feedback. We appreciate it.

21. Michael Arrington
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 12:38 pm

    Gina,

    Ok, I reverse my position on interaction with the public. This is exceptionally professional of you and I appreciate the feedback.

    Mike

22. Yoz
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 1:22 pm

    In addition to Gina’s comments (and Chris Messina’s, which put across an excellent point about timeframes) I’d like to address a couple of others -

    vincent: You’re right in that our apps are not eaily localisable right now. This is something we’re already at work on addressing, in a way that will make apps much easier to translate without diving into the middle of PHP code. In addition, we want app creators and users to be able to collaborate on providing translations for each others’ apps.

    hyther: “I agree with Mike completely on his comment that 99.9% of the Internet population is looking to create new application from scratch.” This is not quite what Mike said, and nor do I believe it’s true. In my experience, when a non-technical friend or family member wants me to build something for their site, the vast majority of the time they point at an existing site and say, “I want one of those.” This is not to say that others don’t want to build something new, but blank-slate-building is not the most popular thing out there. For example, the success of blogs, 99% of which were created after seeing an existing one.

    Mike D.: I would argue with the point where you write off 90% of internet users. We fully expect that 90+% of our users will not be app creators. In fact, that’s an aim. We want to be a good enough platform to create apps that the vast majority of our users can simply use apps that others have created, rather than building/cloning their own.

    Ryan Williams: We offer plenty of opportunity to monetize. You can run your own ads, you can put the app under your own domain, you can hide your code. In the future we’ll be offering more business-oriented features.

23. Edward Vielmetti
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 1:27 pm

    bubble bubble bubble

24. Michael Arrington
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 2:39 pm

    Hey Yoz, Pingbacks without links are bad form. Of course, you could argue my post was also bad form, so I guess we’re even.

25. Yoz
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 2:58 pm

    Mike - we thought a pingback would be of use since it’s directly relevant to the conversation, but you’re right in that there should have been a direct link. This is now fixed.

    (Oh, and it’s Y-O-Z. )

26. Lucas Gonze
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 3:43 pm

    I dunno, Michael, I think you’re jumping the gun just a little. Making software takes patience, and Ning is only about three months old.

27. micheal
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 4:08 pm

    Check out
    http://www40.brinkster.com/libertatogo/index.html

28. Hyther
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 9:02 pm

    Yoz: “the vast majority of the time they point at an existing site and say, I want one of those.” This may hold good when building your web site home page or setting up common apps like blogs or forums. Think of excel spreadsheets as web apps. How many spreadsheets you copied and used vs the spreadsheets you created for your own needs and problems? The point I am making is most of the time people (non-developers) need simple form-based apps like tracking apps, planning apps, survey apps, to meet their transient needs and share it with people. The details in such apps may vary confine to their own needs and problems. However I don’t rule out people choosing from template, copy an app and customize. But such customization should be fairly easy with few clicks than editing the PHP code (which is okay for a developer).

29. Gina Bianchini
    

    January 20th, 2006 at 9:55 pm

    Hyther,

    “…such customization should be fairly easy with a few clicks…” we’re striving for just that here at Ning. For example, with Review It (http://reviewit.ning.com), you can decide what you want to review - any set of products or locations on a map. It is highly flexible without ever having to touch code.

    We’ll continue to offer more and more of these types of apps in the coming weeks.

    Thanks!

30. Chad Gniffke
    

    January 21st, 2006 at 12:54 pm

    I just wanted to drop a quick comment and tell you how much I have enjoyed your blog. I have been reading it for about a month now and will continue for a very long time. Keep it up.

31. macewan
    

    January 21st, 2006 at 12:54 pm

    Interesting that this is followed the next day with the following email to the
    ninglist.

    From: Gina Bianchini
    Reply-To: gina-ning@ning.com
    To: ning@lists.ning.com
    Subject: [SPAM] New at Ning
    Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2006 08:28:08 -0800 (11:28 EST)

    New at Ning:

    The Beta Period is Over! You can now jump straight in to cloning, coding and creating your own social web apps from the thousands running on Ning today. Clone and run any social web app on Ning for FREE.
    * Run Your Own Google or Yahoo Ads For FREE. Run Google or Yahoo ads for FREE on any of your social web apps on Ning and keep what you make. After you’ve created your social web app, just follow the “Make Premium” button on the Ning homepage.
    * Map Your Domain Name and Hide Your Source Code. You can now map your own domain name on top of your Ning app. You can also hide your source code. Just follow the “Make Premium” button on the Ning homepage.
    * Enjoy the New Ning Sidebar. In the first of several style upgrades we have in the pipeline, the new Ning Sidebar takes up less vertical space while providing more information.
    * Faster Performance. We’ve made substantial performance improvements to our little service which you’ll notice as both an app creator and user.
    *
    Coming Soon:

    More Features to Make Ning Even Easier and Fun to Use
    * More Social Apps to Clone and Run
    * Build New Social Apps from Scratch without Any Coding
    * Support for Ruby and Other Programming Languages
    *
    Go ahead and give it a spin!

    - Gina Bianchini, CEO & Co-Founder, Ning

32. TechTrader
    

    January 21st, 2006 at 4:42 pm

    Uh, didn’t we see this coming?

    http://techtrader.blogspot.com.....eb-20.html

33. Web 2.5 Blog
    

    January 22nd, 2006 at 8:36 am

    So, when’s your correction coming out, Mike?

34. Michael Arrington
    

    January 22nd, 2006 at 11:34 am

    I haven’t decided yet if a correction is in order, or an update. Hopefully I’ll have an opportunity to see some of the new stuff (and stuff I apparently missed) next week. I’ll certainly re-post at that time.

    I will say this - the urge to trash me must have been very high at Ning on Friday. That didn’t happen and they deserve huge credit for that.

    Also, one of the comments above pointed to alexa and I just checked it out. All of this discussion has certainly helped move people to the Ning site over the last couple of days, which can’t be all bad. http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....ng.com#top

35. Sridhar Vembu
    

    January 22nd, 2006 at 1:52 pm

    I posted “In Defence of Ning” in my blog http://svembu.adventnet.com/pe.....ning.html. I think the service is quite good - and it is so young. We just need to keep the expectations in check.

    Sridhar

36. dB.
    

    January 22nd, 2006 at 4:57 pm

    Wow, this IS the hot topic. People are talking about Ning in SN-interested circles and I get the ning question once a day now.

    I believe that technology for a social networking site is only 1% of the problem. It’s true that it’s the foundation, but it’s also true that it takes a solid developer about two weeks to whip up these basics. I’ve done it with http://www.foodcandy.com (friendster for foodies). Lets say that in two years ning lets you build anything in SN in 30 seconds. But …

    This is not software that you can sell by the thousands. Ning cannot make $ from the software. I think that ‘long term’ is a gimmic. The exit strategy is that if one site is wildly successful, it has justified itself fully through, for exampe, ad sales. It’s just free, for now.

    I also think that any truly successful site built on ning will fork. Will rebuild the core to be free. They will license the software for continuity because the decision will be made by biz and not by tech.

    Don’t dismiss ning. It’s a smart idea. Now i’ll go write my own code…

37. Gina Bianchini
    

    January 23rd, 2006 at 8:49 am

    Michael,

    I’m looking forward to showing you some of the new things we have coming out when we get together this week.

    In the meantime, you don’t need to wait to meet with me to see the things that you missed.

    You can go to our site, create an app (I recommend Review It or Marketplace with Maps as a few of the more substantial apps we offer for cloning), and start running your own Google or Yahoo ads for free. You’ll need to know how to set up AdSense in the code, but that’s the case anywhere else on the web today.

    With the new things we’re rolling out the whole Ning experience will be easier and more straightforward, but in terms of your direct critiques of us, it’s all in there now.

38. reuven
    

    January 23rd, 2006 at 4:40 pm

    it appears that 37 signals’ ruby on rails is neither cool nor useful.

39. e.dispatch
    

    February 2nd, 2006 at 7:32 am

    So where is Ning? I haven’t been able to access ning.com in a couple of days now.

40. Al
    

    February 5th, 2006 at 11:56 pm

    Are there any other companies like Ning? Companies that let you “Clone” a website?

41. mj
    

    February 23rd, 2006 at 6:05 pm

    the thing ning left out is that social software is about human dynamics, social behavior. the tool determins the evolution of the group and ultimately it’s success but to design it, you must look at the behavior you want to facilitate. Looks to me like no thought has gone into moderation strategy, karma, social capital etc. The apps I see here are one-liners with no room for social value or impact.

42. SoftMaster
    

    April 15th, 2006 at 4:51 pm

    I just wanted to drop a quick comment and tell you how much I have enjoyed your blog. I have been reading it for about a month now and will continue for a very long time.

43. Laender
    

    April 18th, 2006 at 11:40 am

    Are there any other companies like Ning? Companies that let you “Clone” a website?

    Thats a interesting question…

44. Tom21
    

    June 5th, 2006 at 3:38 am

    When is it going to take place?

45. Schwarzenbek
    

    July 20th, 2006 at 9:38 am

    Thank you for the great information. Greetings from Schwarzenbek Infos Bilder Postkarten

46. Tottigol
    

    July 25th, 2006 at 2:45 am

    Are there any news? New events scheduled or something like this?

47. mashup
    

    July 29th, 2006 at 10:26 am

    I am sure that uber techfox Amy is working there. Anyway good luck.

48. daso4
    

    September 27th, 2006 at 12:40 pm

    Hm… at first the idea sounds interesting to me - but ….

    “…Third, Ning keeps all of the applications under the ning.com roof…”

    this kept me out.

49. HeavyInfo
    

    October 3rd, 2006 at 2:32 pm

    Any updates on your thinking about Ning Michael?
    It seems like there has been some new development coming out from them lately.

50. Tottigol
    

    October 25th, 2006 at 4:17 am

    Don’t know, but I’m also interested in … Greetz, Tottigol

51. Smith
    

    February 14th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    Your guestbook is example of middle-class guestbooks. Congratulation! I�ll show your site and guestbook to my friends.