Take off the priest robes, guys.

In this nit-picking, you’re forgetting the salutory lesson of the iPod/iTunes nexus — it’s not the technology, it’s the ease-of-use for the majority of users.

This offer is extended to anyone reading through. It’s $3999 per month plus 5k for the cost of licensing our social networking platform.

I’m not exagerating, within one month I went from ‘concept’ to a lucrative video advertising startup and I could not have done this with out Ning. Ning allowed me to circumvent the bullshit around dealing with VCs and launch a company. I have over 1,100 members now working for me and that list is growing day over day. I was very selective about who could join and I’ve banned hundreds who aren’t qualified. I’m now bidding on seven figure advertising deals, in short, I’m 100% kicking ass thanks to Ning. They’re product and service is outstanding. To all you nay sayers I say, dissing Ning is utterly dumb. It’s free and highly effective. If you factor it in creatively you can achieve miracles.

It will ultimately be sold to some sucker, much like Opsware was sold to HP, when they their Server Automation product was losing customers and it’s revenue share was on the decline.

Who is the sucker this time? Yahoo? …?

How dare you??? Well I’ll be….
I read it just fine. It said they have 100k groups. They let people start groups under their own domain and have it resolve to their IP via an apache module. Ning/HTTP server is either Apache or Lighttpd with a name hack and , period. Exerpt from what the apache C module probably looks like:

static int mod_ning-a-like_method_handler (request_rec *req)
{
r = req;
if (strcmp(”mycustomdomain.com”, &r->filename[strlen(r->filename)-strlen("mycustomdomain.com")])) {
# oh noes, we redirect to our “custom Social network script” for mycustomdomain.com
}

Then they just tell people to point their domain to their server via godaddy.
It’s that easy. I could do the same thing with sitespaces.net and allow our 108,000 members to all create their own instance of the website. But of course I would have to cripple it down to group features only to compete with Ning.

And yes, our developers are low rent. And I’ll stop telling people about them the day people stop taking us up on the offer. Until that day, I will keep on keeping on.
BTW: http://www.flic...os/8606487@N03/
Google here we come.
http://www.msnb...om/id/20823046/
Google here they come.
There’s a new gold rush online and you have to go high or stay home. The level of entry should keep the people that messed up the social networking boom at home this time.
And come on 5 years later is a little too late, even for bandwagoning. We were only 2 and just got the ripples of the wave.

In other words, YES, it is true that you must give up something to accept using Ning (email registration of users, pay for your adsense placements and domain pointing), BUT, they have unbelievably responsive Tech support, great backup and interface options, and allow one to be up and running the content/advertising in no time, so that effort can be spent on monetizing or building the user base instead of programming or doing back-end work on the server.

My test-site was http://www.soci....trikepilot.com and we were able to get almost 50,000 unique views and almost 5000 unique viewers (160+ registered members plus lurkers I guess) in only seven weeks. This was remarkable for us given that our site is a niche about a wild hobby of flying Ultralight and Microlight Aircraft (motorcycles with wings!). Our members are able to post all their video and photos and blogs and stories in a jiffy without any knowledge of programming (they are almost universally newbies). We’re now hosting a couple hundred videos and nearly a grand of photos, with zero effort on the back-end chores.

Gina and Phil seem to be on top of this thing like foxes on a hen-house, and every time I’ve had any issue they were personally in touch within an hour or less. Ridiculously great service for a startup, let alone a largely funded company? I’ve never had the CEO of any service or plugin I’ve used in the last 15 years email me personally answering tech questions before??

Anyway, take your own view… but they are not all things to all people, just really good at doing one specific set of things for a specific set of people. I was able to seamlessly blend my Ning network into my original domain site as well, which was icing on the cake.

Michael

http://www.ning...unt/signup.html

The signup is shared, the users seem to be shared amongst the groups, ala livejournal and myspace. There seems to be a logical separation of groups from the rest of the site, where they pulled a wordpress, with an apache virtual domain module that lets users point their domain at the server. We did that with subdomains actually, and so does livejournal.

Instead of setting up virtual domains in httpd.conf, the C module just takes the apache request and matches it to a database, then sends it to a php page accordingly. Just like apache mod-redirect. It took 5 minutes to code ours with an apache 2 C module template.

All this to say that users are shared between groups or networks. I wouldn’t believe the user count if they released it. I would want to exec the SQL count(userid) statement on the DB myself before I believe it.

Mike give high number 100k but no backup – just 100k – how many are active as Jimmy #1 say? No give that cuz this is thank you post.

I was one of the first to jump on the bandwagon of Social networking when it got really popular, and I have to say, I see it starting to taper off. I see lots of new startups in California going after Google’s search. We are investing in that. We investing in Social networking back in the summer of 2005 and haven’t since. It’s getting too watered out and it’s too common now.