The user involvement is strong.

If it wasn’t for techcrunch and MA’s attempts to resurrect them every six months I think they would have been long gone into the great void of nothingness by now.

hahaha… this is so funny. They’ll never be known for anything else ever again.

“most traffic goes to:
girlongirl, freep*rnpost, whiteholes4blackpoles, bigd*ck”

and

“I set up a network on Ning for my High School Alumni Association more than a year ago and it now has 2200 users. Very, very pleased with the platform.”

So far Ning is a great sink for adult traffic. Lots of adult webmasters are using it for offloading bandwidth to them and also for grabbing new viewers. No doubt just like paypal and others they will ditch the porn when they get an IPO, but for now its all gravy for the traffic.

However if they could provide the tools for those users like the one who set up the Alumni to sell their pics and content to the majority of porn surfers on the site I’m sure they’d have the first “ebay socnet”

Keep up the great work, guys, you’re doing a Heckuva job!

PS: Sorry if this appears twice. The first time got blocked b/c I included a link to my buddy Alan Greenspan’s social network, which is also on ning.com. It’s at “alangreenspan” instead of “failure” in the URL.

I heard Alan Greenspan’s got one too: http://alangreenspan.ning.com

Keep up the great work, guys, you’re doing a Heckuva job!

and that’s a big plus for Ning, in my book.

for me, i would have loved to use them for some projects, but i could never get over what i perceived to be the ‘loss of control’ issue – would the users ‘be mine’, could Ning shut me down at any time for no reason at all?, etc.

but, props to them for at least providing infrastructure for folks.

their real competition from the semi-tech crowd is folks like me, who have been relying on drupal (poopal), wordpress, etc. all of these software packages suck in some major regard (crappy forums, crappy forum integration, etc.), or just require installation of a dozen unsupported plugins to have a semi-functional site.

me? i’m sick of custom coding and free software. give me something open source and something that works, and i’ll pay for that mess. Movable Type might eventually offer a ‘community solution’ that you’ll be able to pay for, but thus far, it’s still vaporware.

And WordPress just hired the BuddyPress dude, so they’re going to do something in this space, too.

i’d like to see a full review of the new Ning – pluses, minuses (can u export all data, for instance?), and I think Techcrunch should partner with DemoGirl so we can have a semi-critical demo of any new site and/or release. Screenshots are great, but they’re limited.

include only networks that have more than two members and have had activity once a week for at least a month and my guess is that number comes WAY down, like to under 2000.

Otherwise, regarding Flux, my guess is there numbers are low because the product sucks! Have you seen any of their networks (50cents, Life of Ryan, etc)–they are complete cookie-cutter solutions with minimal features and horrible customization. People don’t take their sites seriously and their visitor loyalty is probably horrible. Ning on the other hand doesn’t have the likes of famous music artists getting people on mass to come by for one visit and never come back again, but they do have real evangelists.

Either way, what I would like to see is more of a programming language–like Facebook’s FBML–just for building your own social networks (”SNML”). Kickapps API is extremely comprehensive, but is missing a lot. The problem here is that these white label social network building tools are made mainly for non-developers. This is why I’m building one made first and foremost for developers, specifically xhtml developers. It includes an extremely advanced drag-n-drop interface, with many components to “drop,” as well as our dynamic markup language and a menu-based markup selection system.

There are a lot of white-label RIA builders coming out lately like Roll Base, but ours focus just on Social Networking in a no bullshit way.

Contact me if interested in learning more. (sorry for this spammy post – had to do it this time)

James
from
FaceySpacey.com – “The Startup Incubator”

One main issue, however, is that Ning doesn’t use Open ID so that you can have a single sign-on for integration with other member management systems. Not sure if this will hinder growth, but already network creators are finding this a big problem.