Ning’s New Stuff
Michael Arrington
23 comments »
I wrote a very critical post about Ning two weeks ago that generated a lot of discussion (Rob Hof at Business Week followed my story, then retracted).
The main thing that I took away from the discussion was that Ning employees responded professionally to my admittedly inflamatory post title (Ning - R.I.P.). And they subsequently reached out to both me and the Ning community in general to better communicate their product plans. Ning had been a impenetrable fortress to me prior to that post - I just could not make contact with anyone senior (not that they owe that to me). However, after visiting CEO Gina Bianchini at the Ning offices in Palo Alto last week, I now have a much better idea of where the company is going in the near future. And I am going to post some of the details here.
First of all, Ning already has some dedicated people creating and promoting applications. I saw a number of examples of existing applications, like cinecrap, that are at least defendable as “interesting”, particularly given the early stage of Ning’s product.
Second, Ning is working hard to roll out new features, including dead-simple tools to create uniquely different applications without the need for any programming skills whatsoever.
Currenlty, to do much other than clone an existing application, you need to know PHP or at least HTML. What I saw last week, which was not yet release-ready, was already good enough to make Ning a very useful platform. Basically, they’ve combined an AJAX drag and drop interface with simple web forms to position and interact with modules. A “module” can either be Ning created, or more interestingly, a third party web service such as Google Maps or Amazon book meta data. If I had seen this stuff before, I would not have written my previous post.
There are other great features coming as well, such as a premium hosting plan that allows publishers to put in their own ads, host applications themselves, etc.
The core strengths of Ning are the new tools to build applications without programming skills, and the shared customer base which allows an new application creator to have instant access to all registered Ning customers (you register once at Ning as a user, and can then use all applications).
As many people said in the comments to my previous post, the market will decide if Ning is successful. But they are most definitely not dead.
Not to be argumentative in the face of such a comparitively glowing review, but did want to mention one thing: It’s already possible to run your own ads on the Ning playground, and to have your domain pointing to your app. These features were both released in the “Premium Services” rollout at least a couple weeks ago.
To add your own ads to your app, just go to the homepage, find the app you want, click the “Make Premium” button, and check the ‘Run your own ads’, then “Buy Now”. Enter your password, check the box, and the Ning-run ads go away, and you’re free to add your ads anywhere you’d like them.
I’ve been surprised that people haven’t noticed the premium services features: they seem to me to alleviate a lot of the initial concerns people had about running apps on Ning, for very reasonable prices. Run your own ads, protect your source code, use your domain name… All these seem like they’re pretty cool features, that not many people are taking advantage of.
Did you get any sense about Ning’s plans to court businesses seeking to equip business users with these tools?
Thanks very much for this post, Mike! Very glad to hear your opinions on our upcoming features, and we’re honoured by your compliments on our previous responses.
Your post was the loudest of several wake-up calls we’ve had recently, and we’ve taken it to heart - we’re now going to be much more open about what’s going on.
Just to provide a little more information on what’s coming: We’ll shortly (within the next couple of weeks) be rolling out a major update with greatly-revised look and feel, as well as streamlined guidance and demos for developers who want to experiment with our platform. As you say, the drag-and-drop app building isn’t quite ready for release yet, but we’re working hard on it. In the meantime we’re expanding and polishing up our example apps, which can be cloned and used with no developer knowledge at all - making them more customisable and better looking, and adding apps that are less frivolous, more widely useful.
Thanks again for your comments, and we’ll make sure to keep you informed!
Sounds like a great upgrade. They haven’t dropped a date yet? I’ve used Ning before, as a beta tester, so I’m more then interested to give it another try.
Seems like they are getting their heads straight. It has seemed like a lot of hot air up until now…
One advantage of Ning I have not seen advanced is that Ning apps leverage a shared user pool. Imagine creating a web app and immediately having thousands of users who can login and use it!
I believe this is the ultimate social app platform, since the strength of a social app comes from its broad user base. I believe this strength would then multiply as it is applied across numerous social services. Imagine: flickr x del.icio.us x digg. … Sounds like a page from Yahoo’s social media rap, eh?
I have been creating a Ning application to see just how it all works. I have to admit if I did not know PHP, it would be difficult in its current state. I will be interested to see the new toolset and how easy it makes development.
I am still working out some bugs with the app I created and Ning has been helping me out with some questions I had. The one outstanding I am encountering is that some visitors I have showed the app to cannot see the app and instead see a blank browser screen. I am hoping to get that figured out soon and then post the details on SomewhatFrank.com.
I cloned a Ning app: “Who will be the next Dead Rapper” at http://deadrapper.ning.com
It would be great if Ning had a social network app similiar to Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook (that Ning pets app doesn’t cut it).
Hashim: That’s coming next week.
Frank: That’s definitely an issue we haven’t heard about before. If we’re not already all over it, I’ll make sure that we follow up on it today.
Thanks!
Hi Gina,
Sorry to use this as a support channel but I can’t reach Ning at all since the last post on TechCrunch.
Cleared, cache, cookie. Firefox 1.5, IE6. All gave a blank page after accessing identity.ning.com.
As someone who has developed some test apps this week, I think first and foremost, Ning needs to take care of their server. Do you know how many times during the day my apps go down? For an hour today I couldn’t even access the main ning.com site.
59ideas: Sounds very strange - we’ll need to diagnose this properly and get it fixed. I’ll mail you.
Joe: We were down for a few minutes at 9AM PST today, but certainly less than an hour. There were some performance issues on some apps in the first half of the day, but those should now be clear. What errors were you seeing? Mail me: yozg (at) ninginc.com.