Ning, the build-your-own social network startup, will be rolling out a new feature that allows users to create their own Facebook applications around their Ning networks later this evening.
This won’t be a Ning app - rather, they are giving network operators (users who’ve created Ning social networks and other applications) the ability to easily create a branded Facebook application. The example screen shot (click for larger view) shows integration of Pumkins Central (a Ning social network) videos. The screen shot also shows a separate Ning application showing the user’s Ning friends.
Ning says that no programming knowledge is required to build the applications, and that they will be giving easy step by step instructions to users. Since Ning is also hosting the application, users won’t need to worry about scaling.
Users will be able to add videos, music, podcasts, and photo slideshows to the application.
Smart move for Ning, and this also shows the power of Facebook as a platform and distribution channel, even for its competitors. This should go live later this evening - CEO Gina Bianchini hinted at it in a post on the Ning blog on Friday.
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Smart move !
Facebook has found another great way to entice new and keep current users. Users do want more control over their SN and Facebook is giving it to them.
Very nice
I have 3 premium accounts on Ning, very effective platform. Also unlike most prefab social networks they give you full access to the code if you ask.
Social network in a social network…in a social network. arrgh! This is a fun time for developers creating so much noise on facebook but not so much for the consumer.
Social network in a social network! Are social networking sites getting confused with infinite do loops?
Dang, if you cant get this going jump on something that is going I guess. I compare ning to blogger except ning sucks. I dont get social network on social network. Hmm Blogger integrated into Wordpress would create a blog on a blog. anyone want to create this idea, you might get funding. lol.
but dude its soooo meta!
Hmmm. I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome from joining all of these social sites. I thinks it’s a government deal to get a hold of our precious bodily fluids (Dr. Strangelove reference for you youngens.).
Would this be social network plus social network = 2 social network or would it be social network times social network = social network² ?
@Allen (#8), it is,
facebook ** n == make facebook founders very very rich, just like youTube ones.
Ning is dumb. I started a SocNet when it launched. Haven’t been back since. Too many websites are throwing their crap on Facebook in the form of “Apps” but they don’t realize that just sticking your stuff on Facebook isn’t the answer. You have to create something compellling AND find a way to monetize. What’s the pointn if you’re not creating any revenue? People get a clue, no one is going to pay you $50/registered user if all these users are ALSO available on Facebook.
Duh?
Hey all! Actually, the way to think about this is that you can embed videos, photos, music, and podcasts from a social network on Ning into Facebook, the same way you can embed videos from YouTube or photo slideshows from Slide on a MySpace page.
In other words, it’s not *that* meta
Hey, Emma - sorry to hear that you think Ning sucks. If there’s something specific we can do to suck less, by all means drop me a note at ceo(at)ning(dot)com.
Thanks!
Hey Not Sold!
We totally recognize that creating a social network is not going to be for everyone and adding an application to Facebook isn’t a panacea for the world’s ills. It’s just another nice feature we can offer our Network Creators as a means of getting their networks out into the world.
That being said, I think that there are ton of compelling social networks on Ning today that people are creating for fun as much as (if not more than) for money.
Thanks!
Gina, you rule. Good CEO work here (and there too).
We love Ning.
We were looking for a simple solution for coordinating our 20 year high school reunion and I set up a site on Ning in about 10 minutes. (http://www.brooklinehigh.ning.com)
In less than 2 months 100 classmates have signed up (20% of our class) and created profiles. Everyone loves the site and how easy it is to set up their own custom pages, designes, etc. And…. it is all Free. We are now going to “group” for our class and then open the site up to all alumni from our school.
This new functionality is a great addition. Now folks can port the content that they create on Ning to other social networks.
Kudos on a great product and keep the upgrades coming.
Keith
I have to agree with posters that Ning is a disappointment. While they are trying hard, I am not impressed with what I have seen so far. Then again, I don’t have 1/10th the track record of the folks there, so I probably should just shut up and get to work
The only thing that gives me hope to keep trying is that even famous people with great hits on their resume (Marc Andressen, Sabeer Bhatia etc) struggle to hit again.
I am or mistaken or isn’t the only rule that Facebook has for Apps is something like:
“No building a social network within/upon our social network”
I could have sworn I read that somewhere.
Here is a comic strip take on this:
http://toondoo.com/View.toon?param=28605
Hey …another bored dude!
What specifically are you looking for from Ning? I’d love to understand what would make it less of a disappointment to you.
You can drop me a note at ceo(at)ning(dot)com if there’s something specific you’d like to share.
We totally understand Ning won’t be for everyone, but certainly haven’t heard from people using it that they are disappointed. If you are, I’d definitely love to hear from you what we can do to improve it.
Thanks!
Ning rules.
I’m a member of Adgabber.com which is built on Ning, and I love it.
Gotta give Gina some love here. . . she replies to customer emails & feedback directly on the Ning forums all the time . . . I know only a handfull of CEO’s that would do that.
Ning is not a bad concept, just a bit ahead of its time when all other social networks are busy building their user bases. While facebook finally started this platform push Ning was a social network platform all along. At the end of day, users rule as we see how powerful facebook gets while Ning has to jump in and compete with all other “face painters”.
NING COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER IF IT WAS A DIRECT FB OR MYSPACE COMPETITOR. THEY SHOULD HAVE DONE THIS RATHER THAN WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
love how the say ___ number of sn that have been created but how many are active and being used. I have set up at least 4 to test but never used. Same goes for my mates who check it out.
they would also have been better off making it OPEN SOURCE AND ALLOWING ON OWN SERVER. WP FOR SNets. too bad.
will - I agree with you. I could use some pointers from her on how she keeps her temper in the face of random trolls.
also agree
Ignore em! You know what they say, you can’t please them all. Its great to see you try though.
I setup a few facebook apps with the new tools and everything worked great. Some of the setting configs might be a little tough for a novice user but your directions were easy to follow.
Would be nice if these apps could be based on the unique ning user as opposed to the entire social network. This way each user could show off their photos and video individually.
Hi Sean - Glad you like it. Yes, we plan to add an individual user setting in the next rev. Thanks!
gina,
instead of focusing on consumer side, i would recommend focusing on enterprise social networks….tht is where i guess ning brings value….it is fun to have facebook app, but it does not bring any value to ning, other than we are also there kind of feeling!!
Gina has replied to me personally a couple of times when I had some problems, so major respect for that - great concept and very easy to use
Disclaimer - I was sent a cool t shirt, baseball cap and coffee mug!
Michael,
In my opinion the Ning concept of building your own social network startup is confusing for many people. Embedding your social network in a social network is even more confusing. At least for me. It hard to write detailed explanation why you don’t like something if you don’t simply understand what is the purpose of embedding sn in a sn.
Do you remember the times when people had problems with understanding how to use search engines? Try to explain to ordinary people, who only use web mail, check weather forecast and have one sn account, the benefits of starting own sn startup and embedding it into facebook.
Ning is a confusing product, and Facebook built what they were trying to build faster than they could and now Ning is trying to play catch up. The product was uber-geeky first, then it became more social, and now it’s piggybacking on Facebook. Why aren’t people getting it ? What’s wrong with Ning? Is Gina doing all she can to get the product where it’s supposed to be? Does it really help to have founded one of the biggest web1.0 products (netscape) to take over the web2.0 world? Time will tell, but time seems to be on other, younger startups’ side so far…
I initially thought Ning was somewhat confusing (end of 2005). They’ve really turned the system around in the last few months, and it’s much more impressive than it used to be. I think it’s both because the underlying tech has been improved, but also because of the focus on core social network functionality first and foremost. I wrestle a bit with some of the things I’d like to do that it doesn’t support yet, but then realize I can write them myself if I have the time - the code is available to modify.
The other thing I wrestle with is that, as an advanced developer, I’m not really their core audience. I’ve used ning to make basic networks for my family and for a local toastmasters group. It was significantly easier to get these groups set up on the web than other products I’ve tried, the users can use and understand it easily, and I still have the ability to modify things if need be - it’s currently the best answer (imo) for these sorts of groups.
It seems that ning allows people to create ‘throwaway’ groups, but we’re not quite yet to the point where people see enough value in the ‘throwaway’ group concept, at least in most situations. Evite is more or less a one-off throwaway group idea - get everyone to meet at a restaurant or wherever. That took off pretty well. If ning can put together vertical solutions to attack these sorts of areas, it’ll do even better than they already have. Specifically, I guess I’m looking at ways of auto-creating accounts for people with just email addresses as the primary ID, instead of a username, which I think is how evite works.
To the issue of ‘how many *active* networks are there?’, who knows? How do you define active? How many active myspace accounts are there? Or Yahoo accounts? I’ve multiple IDs on myspace, yet never use them - logged in a few times for testing purposes, but now they’re dormant. I still get counted in the “4 billion myspace user” number thrown around. That’s in large part a nature of the business. Sourceforge should also quit promoting ‘150,000′ projects, because by my reckoning, 70% of those are just project names registered without any code ever having been committed, let alone released.
this is just too ‘much’ - whatever floats ning’s boat i guess
@ Grzegorz Daniluk
It is not quite embedding a sn inside another, what Ning made with this new “Facebook promotion” feature was to give the ability for those who want to, to embed elements of a sn he is part of into their personal profile on other websites (in this case, facebook). It is like the embed html code for videos, music and photos, which in the case of a blog or a less restrictive platform you would be able to do that by simply pasting one html snippet, but in the case of fb you would have to run through a more complicated process. This feature makes it more simple and accessible to regular people that don’t want to dig into fbml/api docs and server configuration themselves.
For example, I have a music podcast/blog for which the community related stuff I am setting up a network on Ning for, and it was very straightforward to me to “create” a full featured facebook application (a branded music player in this case) for all members of my community who uses facebook (I heard that a lot of people do this days) to add this neat piece of personality add-on on their profiles
PS: for those curious, the app url is http://www.facebook.com/apps/a.....da5d7e7a9a
and yes, my comment should be taken with a grain of salt because I am a Ning fanboy/developer/crew member.
i find it ironic. social network maker inside a social network. just imagine if you could display some sort of facebook data in a ning, that would make an infinite loop
I love Ning - I’d use it to build my social network - until I see that, even with a professional account - I don’t have access to the users directly. They become Ning users rather than my users. I can understand this kind of setup for a free account, but if I’m paying, I should be able to have access to the users.
Damian
I tried Ning, Onesite, and KickApps, and KickApps was by far the best. Damian’s point is the one that is a sticking point with a lot of people. With Ning, the network you create is not a standalone network of your users, as they are with Kickapps. It’s almost like the network you create is a sub-network of some grand Ning network they want to roll out at some future date. This is true of Onesite, as well.
With KickApps, the users are “mine.” I also like the ability to tweak the look of the site at multiple levels, from implementing brand new style sheets to simply replacing specific lines to using the drop dead simple admin interface.
Hey all! Thanks for the great comments and feedback. We love both the good and the bad. Without it, we can’t get better
Damian & Jake - I would clarify that on Ning, any information your members provide you on your network, including their email address if they want to give it to you, is yours to use as you’d like. We’ll be offering shortly the ability for Network Creators to ask private questions that go only to them. This is why enterprise companies like the CW, Fine Living, and CBS are happy using Ning today.
More generally, though, I do appreciate your desire to feel like the people using your network are “yours” in that they register with you. We can have a philosophical debate on this whole concept of “ownership” and what you really own when you have someone’s email address vs. the benefits of having the right to advertise or run ecommerce on a website, but that’s for another conversation, probably one over beers.
We protect the Ning ID because it enables people to sign in and manage multiple networks from one account, which people have told us they like more than signing up separately for each and every social network they want to use. Again, this isn’t going to work for everyone, but we think that at a certain point this will be a benefit for the people creating networks on Ning.
With this feature, we certainly don’t have some grand master plan for world domination. We just want to make it easy for one person to join and manage multiple social networks. I wish it were more sinister than that
The one other difference I would flag between Ning and any of the enterprise social networking companies is that we are a fraction of the cost. In most cases, we give you an enterprise quality service for free. For example, to add any type of ecommerce transactions on your network is free. To run your own ads, it’s $19.95 per month. All of our premium services taken together sum to around $40 per month. I believe KickApps and others are in the thousands of dollars per month, although I might not have the latest information on there. On these services, the users are “yours” (loosely defined), but you are also paying for it. That’s going to be cool for a lot of people and we totally respect that, but it’s different from Ning.
Again, thanks for the great feedback and conversation here. We really appreciate it!
If you’re suffering from all this meta networking, networks within networks, friends in your Face(book) - check out Social Hermits at Ning http://hermits.ning.com
I’m not going to invite you, I don’t want you to be my friend. Apart we are together.
Hey Ivan! That’s awesome.
I think you guys are being way to harsh on Ning… I essentially see Ning going after the long tail of Social Networks..
They don’t try to be everything to everybody…
my.02
In Ning, the users do NOT belong to you. Essentially they sign in by agreeing to Ning´s terms of conditions and stay in Ning Database. There is a little bit of “evil” here.
Ning is also not trying to be “white label” : when Ning is down for maintenance, users see Ning Logo appearing; when users register they receive a confirmation email from Ning.
@Ning is Not Yours
A shared database is not necessarily “evil”, in Sourceforge, all projects share the same infrastructure and to use the forums/cvs/bug-tracker/etc you sign-up with sourceforge TOS. And still, as a project owner hosting my stuff on Sourceforge(or google code for that matter) the contributors, testers and users of my projects, dont belong to sourceforge, first because they belong to themselves and second because, if at any day I decided to stop using the infrastructure provided by sourceforge or google, I have ways to migrate all my data and all my users content elsewhere.
Whith Ning it is the same thing, I can start my social application or social network there, grow my userbase and features without having to think about all the basic stuff that are sometimes demotivating to implement although commodities nowadays (authentication system, data host, forum setup, comments/ratings, video transcoding, caching, bandwidth, etc..), and take whateaver me and my users built overtime elsewhere once/if Ning ever stop fitting my community needs. A network owner do have access to all user contributed data, including the attached value like comments, tags, ratings etc, and all user-provided information of their profiles, and if he/she decides to take their sn *with* their users data to another place, backing up/importing everything should not be a problem. And even if you dont like or dont agree with one or other aspect in the sn implementation (like Ning’s central authentication system for example), you have access to the full application source code and are free to change it to fit your needs.
For the second part, I agree with you, network creators should be able to customize the maintainance page, this is something on our to-do.
Ning is cool but it has to find its true identity. Is it a social portal with a focused yet large audience(e.g. facebook, myspace etc.) or a software provider turned to ASP(e.g. wordpress)? It’s actually not that hard to come up with a social site(2000+ and counting) without Ning and the truly niche ones( with the ambition to seek venture capital, control their own user base and site features ) will most likely have to build their own.
jason: in my opinion, Ning is nothing more than a Web 2.0 version of eGroups and ezboard and appears to be attracting the same sort of audience (and clutter).
Don’t get me wrong; this doesn’t mean that it’s not a useful service for a specific type of user, but the hype seems unjustified to me.
Curious how Gina has so much free time to spend on this forum??????
@Zack:
Why do you think someone posting here would be considered doing so in their ‘free time’? Perhaps part of her role is to deal firsthand with PR issues. With an audience and large and savvy as TechCrunch’s, spending a bit of time here reading people’s reactions to an article about her company strikes me as someone who’s devoted and passionate about their company. Wouldn’t it be nice if Mark Zuckerberg or Terry Semel would pop in now and then to get a good understanding of what people thought of their companies? Can someone handle every single blog/forum that way? Obviously not. But again, given the size/focus of TechCrunch, keeping up with postings about your company makes sense.
@jason
I dont see Ning itself as a social portal like myspace orkut or facebook (although one social portal can be built on top of Ning’s platform), the second analogy comes closer (wordpress) Ning provides a framework/platform and hosting. As for niche developers, I would say that they have a pretty good control over their features and users (the full source is available to modify/adapt/extend ) and the entry-level cost is pretty reasonable (free) I think it all depends on the kind of ambition we are talking about, and Ning would not be the solution for everyone.
CCHits (cchits.org) is one example I can think of social application that could have been made using other resources, but given it was a one-(lazy)man’s job it would have never existed in the first place without the Ning platform… not everyone wants to build websites to sell it and have a Porshe, people still do this kind of stuff for (God forbid) fun
I remember the description of the Ning platform as a “playground” for developers in the early days, and I still think that this is in it’s identity, with the difference that now a more mature product (social network builder) coexists within this playground and it is not just for developers anymore.
Having the right level of Schizophrenia on an fast-changing world may pay more than to force up a “true identity”… just my 2 cents.
I have ten of those 64,000 networks, but they all have been idle - other than random people sending me friend requests where I can’t seem to get much information about these people - as in who are you and why do you want to be my friend? I wonder if it is possible to set it up so I won’t get an e-mail box full of friend requests unless I want to receive them??? I like the community features of Ning on my sites more than I like the idea of having my users getting a lot of random and almost spammy friend requests.
My goal is to spend the next few weeks with Ning so this conversation is very helpful.
I was going to work on Ning last month, but visited one of my sites on a Saturday night and found the site down with the big Ning logo telling me the site was down. I wish the network was more white label, and wonder why maintenance would be done during Saturday night prime time??? Turned me off a bit so I spent more time on my other sites.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Ning so far because it will allow me to do things I’ve always wanted to do. I’m not very technical so I’ve been waiting for hosted applications to be invented. My sites will become better without all of the tech responsibility falling on my shoulders.
I’ve seen amazing progress so far. Last year, the platform was too difficult for me to use and this year - so far - it is much more of what I have been looking for.
I really enjoy the Ning Network Creators site because other people like me get together and talk about what we need from Ning and share our experiences with each other. I also enjoy how Gina and the Ningineers participate so much.
One suggestion (here on TechCrunch) is to make sure all Ning employees disclose that they are Ning employees so we know which comments are coming from within the company.
As for the ability for users to share pics and vids on Facebook, I love it. I spend way too much money trying to market my sites so any type of feature that could lead to viral marketing is greatly appreciated.
Ning got a little bananas on the comments when TC wrote about a competitor. I’m glad they’ve succeeded in getting coverage as well
I think eventually facebook applications will be like the old days when everybody were buying cisco routers - before long, it was every other week news that somebody was getting them and nobody talked about it. But I like the idea of what Ning does, I think there is a market for it.
uh, if you want your own social networking - and i mean total control over everything, not like ning, not like kickapp, not like facebook-ning, then head on over to http://www.elgg.org and see how u. of brighton has built their own network for over 35 thousand users, or how elgg.org and explode.us have integrated many disparate networks without centralizing the user base…oh, and yes, it’s open source software, unlike the others…now, when ning gives me the option to download the software and the application i’ve built along with all of my users (within the networks i’ve built, but with ‘masked’ id info), then i’ll be able to take them seriously…otherwise, they’re all just asking us to help them aggregate users to put more ads in front of…or am i wrong? that’s all i see…facebook is just geocities or tripod with more widgets and bullshit…lipstick on a broadband pig baby, still a pig.
@dave
To download a copy of the application source code on Ning just shoot an email to developer at ning… asking for a copy of the code, the license over the code is very similar to a LGPL and it is most php. And by default all social networks applications are open source, which means anyone can take a peak on how something was implemented (with the exception of the networks who paid for the premium service of closing the source code), I have some bookmarklets that might be useful to explore the code of existing Ning apps and social networks at http://goodmor.ning.com/bookmarklets.html
As for the download of your users data, you can either use the REST or PHP APIs for that, you have access to all information they provided to you plus some information that they provided to Ning for the NingID registration(the default authentication system), the exception is the email address, and if you also need that info from your users, it is simple to include this as part of your network’s “join” process with a copy of the code.
You are definitely not wrong about the lipstick pig in the case of myspace and facebook, but in the case of Ning, you are not necessarily gathering eyeballs to other company’s advertisers, you don’t need to expose your community to ads if you don’t want to, the text ads that are present on free networks can be removed or replaced with yours by purchasing a premium service at the cost of $20/month.