If you haven’t taken the time to try out the new Ning today, Robert Scoble has filmed an excellent demo of the product (basically the same demo I saw yesterday) from CEO Gina Bianchini. There’s a lot of coverage from other bloggers as well.
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wow – must be ning day
That is one sexy CEO/Demo….She can Ning me anytime!!
seeing a relatively young, slender woman as a ceo is like a breath of fresh air from the typical overweight elderly male stereotype
Hey Marc or lady in the video! I hope you read this and I want royalties!
You should add to your agreement something where if a social network gets HUGE using Ning and eventually want to build something custom and move ALL their Ning members over to it…they have to pay a fee per user and then you zip up ALL their data for them and send it over.
I don’t know what the price per user would be but something where you guys make a nice profit and where the creator of the social network can afford making the move. If you have 100,000+ dedicated members it would be worth it.
This will offer potential creators and promoters of the social network assurance that if all their hard work pays off and they create a network that is worth something they go “legit” at some point.
I think you will see A LOT more hardcore entrepreneurs giving it a try then.
Thanks,
Chris
This is great. Now if there were only a prepackaged group of “celebrities” to purchase and add to your network–just to get it started. People pay for stranger things: http://cgi.ebay...em=180090542238.
Shall we bring them a shrubbery?
(maybe only brits will get that)
Hi Chris, all public data on Ning can be accessed through a REST api, so, apart from users private data, it shouldnt be difficult to transport your user’s public content from one place to another.
isn’t this like a beefed up yahoo groups?
SSSSSSHHHHHWWWWWWNNNIIINNNGGGGG!
I thought the goal was to have one social network for everyone, or at least a federation of social networks that communicate, and not a million different social networks. How many profiles is one supposed to maintain? Social networks ought to be people-centric (I have one profile were I list all my hobbies) and not activity-centered (I belong to one network per activity). Well, maybe I am wrong, just a thought.
Ning is like its CEO: pretty.
The problem with Ning is that I’ve encountered three different errors using the site so far. Signing up was slow and hung Firefox the first time I tried it. Then I hit an error page (it said it would tell a developer of the problem). Then I got “Can’t load template file /apps/7/E10/417/idolnetwork/lib/XG_Message/notify-activity.php” when commenting on the American Idol Fan Central page.
I haven’t interfaced with the CEO, so I can’t say if she produces similar errors.
I think I just blew up Ning. Site is down after I signed up!.
Casey
Ago Pai,
I think you’re completely wrong. The most interesting communities are build around given activities/interests. Digg was originally centered around technology and Youtube is centered around Video. It’s obvious that focusing on given activities and/or interests is the way to go if you want to create an interesting community. I agree you’ll find lots of stupid people on both sites but there is always something interesting to share or to talk about on these sites.
Communities that have no real focus like Myspace are a waste of time. Myspace is a huge mess for bored people who have no real interests in life, aside from showing off, stalking and spamming. Try to have a constructive discussion over there. I have a slogan for Myspace: Made for monkeys, used by humans. You get the point here.
boring….
Gina is HOT.
All right, come on, there has got to be at least some negative comments … are we seeing a new generation of fanboys?
Ning is cool!!! Kudos to them.
However on a more critical note, I ‘ll have to agree with Ago Pai. No, I am not criticizing Ning – I’m questioning the feasibility/sustainibility of numberous ideas out here with little value. It’s easy to get excited as a techie, however, thinking as an ordinary user, I need a break. Just to give you an idea what I’m talking about, see the list below for the websites/services I currently use:
gmail
yahoo mail
work mail
yahoo groups (at least 7)
myspace
orkut
facebook
my school’s alumni network
hotmail
msn
YM
gtalk
AIM
digg
delicious
NING
craigslist
letsgo
and many other…
Instead of making my life simpler, technology has made my life very complex. Yes, I do enjoy these services – but again don’t be fooled by excitement of a techie; think from point of view of an ordinary user.
<boner>
I thought this was well-done, informative demo.
</boner>
Ning is indeed awesome. But my question is using their software would Joe Blogs reach critical mass i.e. will a community on Ning be worth millions like myspace, bebo etc.
The answer in reality maybe is NO! Building a community takes more than just fancy software. It needs a hook, constant moderation and total control. The owner of the community needs to be able to decide exactly how it should look (every bit).
If a company is going down this route then it should consider totally open sourcing the software. Or alternatively provide a complete package i.e. conceptualising, reskinning and maintaining the website and charge a on-going monthly fee (taking the pressure of the community owner).
lemon: apparently only you, I and a few other posters think Ning looks like Yahoo Groups in a sexy Web 2.0 package. I’m glad I’m not the only one or I would have to question my sanity. I guess the bad thing about this (for Ning) is that if everybody has forgotten about Yahoo Groups, it might be an indicator of what will happen to Ning at some point. Of course, Yahoo Groups was formerly eGroups, which it purchased during the first bubble and I think Ning has a good shot at getting acquired by a company like Google. Kudos to any startup that can Web 2.0ify a startup from Bubble 1.0 and sell it. It would be a fun experiment to take a concept and business plan from Bubble 1.0, add “social” aspects to it and see if one could obtain funding in this market.
Ning is indeed an interesting way to have another presence on the web and kudos to them on the launch.
But…I agree with SF and Ago Pai. A service should make it easy for a leader setup a custom group AND make an member’s interaction with their multiple groups easy. With any service, an end user usually gets to the point where they just want relevant information from their relevant groups without jumping around to different sites…
So what’s wrong with having a fancier competitor to Yahoo! Groups? Has Yahoo! Groups been doing a lot of innovation in this space as of late? When was the last time they added new features?
Having thought a lot about this space myself I can tell you there’s a lot of innovation that could be done here. Over and above what both Yahoo! Groups and Ning have shown.
Competition drives innovation…
-Steve
Gina is Really Hot.
Just for that we should all be using Ning at least once a day and buy a premium feature now and then
she is kinda cute for a CEO of web 2.0 company….
i tried using the application and it was WAY too slow for my appetite so I will give it another chance tomorrow.
She didn’t even have to say anything
…I was already hooked before she even started talking, oh…and Ning looks excellent (although at the moment it has been trampled to death and is currently not responding).
What’s up with all of these falsely flattering sexist comments?
Hey Guys!
We has a bug tonight, brought the service down, fixed it, and were up again within 45 minutes. This isn’t a scalability and load thing, it’s actually a bug we introduced last night, thought we fixed earlier today, and just saw again. We have a new fix which we’ll be rolling out shortly.
If we can’t be perfect, at least we’ll be responsive and let you know what’s going on.
Thanks!
And yes, one of the ways we are innovating is in bugs that will not die
.
Look, I have to say this, this is the age of keeping it real, right?
I was an early adopter of Ning, and I love it even though it was kind of hard to work on without PHP skills. The staff was very helpful, and attentive (they continually surprised me with this and won me over) and I got what I needed and I continue to use Ning. First and foremost, everyone there has been a great help and has the right attitude about how to launch this kind of company. As long as they keep they same attitude and ability to grow and change with the market, I think they will win.
Okay.
Now let me ruin this post (in the eyes of some) by saying: sweet fancy moses! I had no idea Gina was that beautiful! She is the secret weapon. Amanda Congwho? Give me a Gina vodcast now and you have a dedicated viewer. Momma mia!
Looks like Techcrunch traffic might have hit Ning too hard. I keep getting errors when trying to create my social network.
I’m patient however, and will keep checking back. Ning is definately a great service for entrepreneurs in the social network space. The customization is key.
A HUGE service that could result from Ning is that by eliminating development costs, great ideas can be brought to the ‘alpha stage’ for presenting for seed financing.
I hope its working as promised soon. Great job Gina and team!
Thanks,
Jaafer
http://digitalu.wordpress.com
Folks at Ning -
I can’t believe it, you are storing/emailing passwords in clear?! Not something I would have expected from you folks!
Will there be APIs for adding 3rd party widgets (or “Features” as Ning calls it) in the future? I didn’t see that mentioned anywhere in the docs. Also, will these be added to the Features palette once (or if) approved by Ning?
Ning folks: some of the related questions in the”For Developer” section accessible from http://documentation.ning.com/ are currently broken or referring to non-existent Ning features.
To The TechCrunch Editor:
Can you please explain your comment moderation policy?
Why do you let these sexist comments go public?
Would you allow such comments to go public if they were demeaning to ethnic or religious groups?
In reaction to criticisms of your editorial policies, you have stated that it’s your blog and you have the right to publish what you please. Then you also have the power to decide which comments you accept. Are there no standards by which you decline admission to the comments club?
Mega Social Network indeed.
I would be rich if I had such a CEO
the video is boring anyway
michal
Gabe,
I might not agree w/ the comments regarding this CEO being “hot”, but get real (point of fact…she is attractive). You made your point, even though some people might take offense to your idea of censoring posts. Welcome to America, where you can say what you want and not get thrown in jail. Michael and/or his editors have the final say in what is posted. If they decide to remove posts, wonderful. If they decide to let posts stay up, wonderful. There’s a reason Freedom of speech was prioritized as the First Amendment to The U.S. Constitution.
As for Ning….it’s got some bugs (as expected), but I think it has a good chance of doing well w/ users who want a turn-key SN site w/ basic functionality.
Very cool. Ning provides numerous ways to explore ideas and connect with people. Lots of potential here. While I’m not a MySpace active user (I have a profile, but it’s not relevant to me personally…if I were 19 it probably would), I may actually use Ning.
Typical of an early beta, there are a couple of problems that I encountered (latency + seemingly broken stuff + things not clear). I joined a “social network” and entered a “chatter comment” and it seemed to go nowhere. I’m not sure how/where these are supposed to show up. When I went to post another chatter comment, it told me I needed to be a member (which I already was). So then I entered a blog posting and it never posted.
By the way: I would use a more real- world name for “social network” like “group” or “club”? (’Social network’ is such a silicon valley insider term, and I think MySpace has it right with the term “a place for friends” for the mass audience)
Overall, I can see through the early beta trip ups, and I think they’re onto something compelling.
Last, with all due respect to the accolades on the blog, I still think my wife is way hotter than any of the execs at Ning (especially after 3 kids).
And not, one of the ways we are innovating is in bugs that will not die
.
maruyasu-grape@world.odn.ne.jp
Alas,
Must be frustrating to have the site down during the launch. Marc … I must admit, I expected more from you!
Ning team – Love the product! Great things from the Ning camp.
To SF and Ago Pai and members with multiple profiles on multiple social networks the solution your looking for to manage these are at http://www.ProfileLinker.com . It’s a company that was also profiled by techcrunch found here:
http://www.tech...ial-networking/
I’m a co-founder. Check it out. It manages all your profiles providing message aggregation along with friend updates across all your networks.
Enough promotion. Love the video ning and can’t wait for more updates. I think the name alone gets people hooked.
-Brian
Hi all — thanks for all the comments — the temporary outages we’ve had in the last two days have been very frustrating because we can’t even say they were caused by the huge surge in traffic that we did get — but our engineering team has been working incredibly hard around the clock. Things SHOULD be much better going forward. If we’ve inconvenienced anyone, please email us at ceo at our company name dot com and we will comp our premium services to make up for it.
I second the need-more-beautiful-female-tech-company-CEOs initiative.
who needs this ?
What a stupid waste of time and effort.
Booooring video too.
This is great. I love it! very good!
I love this forum because people so often ask the questions that I would. With this post, however, I actually agree that I’m not as worried about the revenue. So many companies these days play what I call the “YouTube Lottery.” Everyone knows about the crazy money YouTube got, but not much is written (even on TechCrunch) about the 100s of companies that made it nowhere, They didn’t win the lottery the way that YouTube did.http://www.downloadsuite.org
CHAPTER #1 — THE FOUNDATION
For some 2,000 years or more, civilization has been ruled by a social paradigm on which all aspects of the EuroAmerican cultures are based — the “dominator paradigm.” In the past two decades a new social paradigm has been emerging that could have the most profound and fundamental impact on human civilization since hominids first came down from the trees.
The old paradigm placed humans in a purposeful universe created by some supernormal power for the domination and use by man. The new paradigm we, call “A Gaian Paradigm,” suggests a spontaneously self-organizing universe in which humanity is but one of the created tightly linked, interdependent webs of being.
THE DOMINATOR PARADIGM
The “dominator paradigm,” has had a long evolution. It evolved from the Jewish creation myth that held that the earth was created for the use of and domination by man. It was strengthened by Greek philosophy with the postulate that man is the measure of all things. The early Church held that a chain-of-being put man at the top of a hierarchy with only a few celestial beings above.
The “dominator paradigm” was imbedded in the minds of Europe by the thousand-year Inquisitions that burned thousand of heretics, mostly women, at the stake for believing in Earth as our creator. It was spread to the East by the crusades that destroyed “infidel” humans, cities and nations. During the Age of Colonization and Discovery it was perpetuated and made worldwide by the sword (technology), the flag (nationalism), and the cross (Christianity).
Newton’s clockwork concept of that cosmos, and Darwin’s theory of evolution were interpreted to “prove” the validity of the dominator paradigm. It was fixed in our secular moral system by the acceptance of Adam Smith’s economy that human “self-interest,” competition and materialism should, and do, dictate all human actions. This abomination as the essence of humanity now rules the world.
A GAIAN PARADIGM
A Gaian paradigm not only has many roots but can be, and is becoming, the underpinning of a new global network of cultures replacing the now dominant and domineering man-centered industrial cultures. Like all cultures, the new cultures will be, holistic and unified coherences of interdependent components — religion, economics, social and others.
The emergence of a Gaian paradigm is resulting in a deep fundamental transition of our world view, our social institutions and our lifestyles. The need for this transition is being made obvious by the growing numbers of dangers inherent in industrialism including endless wars anc economic breakdowns. But the transition is happening, and being made real by the introduction of many positive and creative social innovations.
This millennium is being looked upon as a time of radical and fundamental change. Minds are opening to new ideas. People are looking for new actions. It is in this spirit of a hopeful, deep, fundamental social transformation that this book is addressed. These are the concepts we’ll explore in the next few chapters.
FOUNDATIONS FOR A GAIAN PARADIGM
Many basic scientific observations led to this new scientific/social paradigm. The advancement of the Gaia theory, the establishment of Chaos and Complexity theories, and new concepts of evolution were among them.
New observations that biological evolution did not progress, as Darwin predicted, in a series of minute changes which led over time to the emergence of new species. Rather, biological evolution happened in quantum leaps. Major biological changes and new species are created in relatively short periods of time after long periods of stability. This observation was designated by Stephen Jay Gold as punctured equilibrium.
James Lovelock, a scientist working for NASA, observed that the biosphere of the Earth was radically different from all other planets. It stayed amazingly constant within ranges which supported life.
At the same time Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist, was studying the evolution of microorganisms over the billions of years before animals appeared on the face of the Earth. She found that life forms were interdependent. Life was able to exist on Earth because of a symbiosis among all life forms and the geological Earth. Everything was interdependent with everything else. Life created its own biome.
Lovelock and Margulis proposed that the whole Earth was a self-organized, self-supporting ecological system At the suggestion of a neighbor of Lovelace, William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, they termed this living Earth system Gaia, after the Greek Earth goddess.
A theoretical understanding of how Gaia, or in fact any system, might spontaneously self-organize came from other fields of science including mathematics, physics and particularly computer science. Chaos and Complexity theories (made possible by computer modeling) have moved science beyond the limits imposed by linear mathematics, algebra and calculus. Study of the transition of order into chaos, or chaos into order, and the formation of complex systems from simpler ones has opened a whole new area for science. Two particular breakthroughs in the field are relevant to the Gaia concepts.
Self-organizing criticality is an idea proposed by Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist, Per Bak. His first computer model representing self-organizing criticality was of a pile of sand. As you pour grains of sand on a spot it slowly builds into a stable inverted cone. As you continue pouring, the cone becomes unstable until sand slides and avalanches restore a new larger stable cone. Bak showed that biological evolution occurred in such bursts. Simple entities formed more complex systems, which remained stable until internal pressures built up and caused a rapid reorganization. There seems to be a law of nature, self-organizing criticality, by which new forms come into being.
Autocatalysis, developed by Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute, is another concept which provides a theoretical base for the evolution of Gaia. Autocatalysis holds that systems of biological entities may promote their own rapid transition into different forms. Kauffman uses the simple example of the slippery-footed fly and sticky-tongued frog. The mutation of slippery footedness gave no environmental advantage to the fly until the mutation of the sticky-tongued frog. Only then did Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest come into play. Networks of potential mutations may develop and remain dormant until triggered by an environmental change or another phenomenon that brings on the avalanche of transition. Autocatalysis, linked with-survival-of-the-fittest. explains how complex organs like the eye, or new species emerge.
Self-organizing criticality and autocatalysis are among the scientific concepts that show how biological entities spontaneously self-organize in quantum-like leaps from simple cells to linked complex networks of cells, organs, plants and animals.
More than that, physicists like Lee Smolin and Nobel Laureate Murray Gellmann, have extended self-organizing back to the beginning of time at the Big Bang, suggesting that the same principle may apply to the self-organizing of fundamental particles into atoms, atoms into molecules, and molecules into galaxies, solar systems, planets, and life.
At the same time economists like Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, Brian Arthur, and Jon Holland have extended the new paradigm in the other direction, to include economics, social organization, and human consciousness.
This new scientific-social paradigm suggests that people have no superior divine mandate within a universe created for them. They are not independent of, above or beyond the natural world in which they are imbedded. They do have the unique ability to understand, through science, the laws that govern them, to envision future worlds, and to co-create those future worlds within the laws of science.
CYBERSPACE AND THE NETWORKED UNIVERSE
“Everything is connected to everything else” is one way of stating the Gaian paradigm. It is a fact of science, and is a social mindset.
In addition it is more than those; it is a fact of technology. “Networking” was identified by John Naisbitt in Megatrends as one of the g was a social and political trend. It was made possible by the ramajor new trends of the twentieth century. As he saw it, networkinilroad, the automobile, the telegraph, and the telephone. Each of these technologies made the Earth smaller and put people in more rapid and reliable touch with one another.
The real quantum jump in networking is only now before us. Computers and the Internet are providing a challenge that has hardly been explored. Cyberspace is a global phenomenon providing humanity the opportunity to work globally in real time. This takes networking well beyond the concept about which Naisbitt wrote only a few years ago, or the concept of transnational networking which was the root of the formation of TRANET, the organization with which I’ve been working since 1976.
The Gaia hypothesis, the theories of chaos and complexity, the Gaian concepts, and the computer technologies which now face us grew independently of one another. But they form a unity. They, in themselves, are an example of the self-organizing principle which shapes all of cosmic evolution. Together they make up the Gaian Paradigm. They challenge us to prepare ourselves for an avalanche of social, political and economic change in the years ahead. This millennium is evolving radically differently from anthropocentric (man-centered) paradigm which has dominated the past 2000 years.
********** END CHAPTER 1 ************
How do you think Gaia will change your life?
There are 22 speculations on the Yahoo URL.
http://groups.y...Paradigm/files/