A year or so ago Ning.com was the belle of the ball. Gina Bianchini, the company’s CEO was featured on the cover of Fast Company. The article “Ning’s Infinite Ambition” detailed their viral loop strategy to getting 4 million Ning communities online by 2010.
Ok, well here we are entering the 4th quarter of 2009 and there are “only” 1.5 million Ning Networks and only a fifth of those are active. Only 3% of the communities are paying to run their own ads. I would argue that is an even better indication of how many truly active. Finally many feel, myself included, that the platform has not evolved fast enough to keep up with Facebook and Twitter. In October 2008 Ning stopped supporting any API activity telling developers to work within the Open Social platform. Not a bad choice for some but certainly not the preferred method for most developers who want to customize their Ning Network and push content out to third party apps ala Tweetdeck, etc.
It’s no secret that Ning’s RSS feeds suck. Their event feed doesn’t even include a field for the event’s date! If ou pull in the date field it’s the date the event was posted which is near worthless. Basically Ning has done as little as possible to make their platform a broadcast platform. It wants everyone to come to their party but they won’t return the favor. Ning just doesn’t play nice.
Also, some feel that Ning is actually a scam. Setting up this cool, white label social networking platform and then co-opting the users that their site admins have gathered. Read an interesting post on this and other Ning theories at Charting Stocks.
It appears that Ning has lots of money, having raised $60 million last April on a $500 million evaluation, also it has yearly revenues around $10 million. Not too shabby. So why aren’t they investing in the platform? Is Ning looking to be bought out? I would argue making improvements would increase that likelihood. Everyday that passes leaves Ning further and further behind. Their unwillingness to let their site administrators easily integrate third party apps and sites has opened the door for new Social Network services like SocialGo.com to get their foot in.
I’m frustrated by Ning. At Small Box we run, consult and develop around several Ning communities, including the Indiana Music site Musicalfamilytree.com and the Indiana business site SmallerIndiana.com, but we consistently run into issues with the platform. Whether it’s bad RSS feeds or little control over the design and functionality we have to be very creative and make numerous compromises on a regular basis. With Musical Family Tree we have actually developed an entirely separate platform that appears to integrate seamlessly but I can assure it was anything but easy to do.
So what’s up Ning? Why won’t you open up the API and let our Social Networks play nice with third party apps? Why won’t you develop the platform to realize it’s true potential?
What do you think? Is Ning on the right track or losing momentum?
Hi Jeb,
Thanks for taking the time to consider and write your thoughts on Ning. We’re listening and would be happy to speak with you about what you’ve posted here.
While we’ve recently been focused on specific features, our team is committed to the Ning Platform as a platform. We are redoubling our efforts to catch up where we’ve lacked and innovate on the platform. In other words, we’re focused on simplifying while also giving Network Creators the right options to make the best Ning Networks for their organizations and interests. We’re looking at every aspect of networks and the platform, including RSS, so please stay tuned!
Please feel free to reach out directly if you’d like to chat about this further,
Thanks!
Laura Gluhanich
Director of Advocacy and Support
Ning doesn’t need to innovate, they need to just get up to speed with the features and reliability that every other routine CMS package offers in 2009.
For example, Ning’s internal search mechanism stinks. That’s okay; buy some Google appliances and go to town.
Ning’s notification emails are downright annoying. “Joe Smith left a comment on Your Social Network. To view this activity, to to http://example/url/.” How about actually *including* the text in the email like everyone else has been doing for years?
Ning doesn’t seem to have spam prevention system. Anybody who has built a decent sized CMS with public access knows, one of the first things you do is to compare a new submission to other recent posts. That way you limit someone trying to post the exact same text in multiple places.
Ning actually DOES have a mobile interface—just add “/m” to the end of a URI. But apparently they can’t configure their web servers to identify your user agent? By the way, this is exactly FOUR lines of code in a standard .htaccess file
Lastly, Ning is simply unreliable. I’ve tried to retrieve old posts and am sometimes only able to use the Google cache. I frequently click on a link and get a 404 error. Random speed issues plague the site.
I’d love to see more from Ning, but in truth, the site has *never* impressed me. I just use it because everyone else uses it. If they can address these fundamental issues, however, I’m sure that the platform can be the basis for much success.
I’ve been pretty irritated by Ning for a while now. My main concern is its integration with other platforms, the annoying notification emails, and its lack of flexibility.
The biggest challenge for ning is that it is extremely difficult to build a self supporting community on a platform like this that doesn’t integrate easily into the tools that people are already using.
Thanks for the comments.
Laura- I appreciate your taking the time to respond. I would like to take a moment here to say that it is very difficult to find any support via my community sites or the Ning.com site. Right now we have some major browser issues on musicalfamilytree.net and I have no idea how to get in touch with Ning! I see that I can pay for “premium support” but I’m already paying about $20-30 a month for other services. I don’t think it’s fair that I have to pay to get support on one issue. The customer service here could be vastly improved. Take some notes from Zappos and get into the business of customer service.
I will also send this to you via email.
Thanks, Jeb
jeb@smallboxweb.com
I do a ning site and many other sites. I have been doing Internet consulting full time since 1996. We always thirst for more out of a piece of software.
Ning is what it is….i am comfortable being patient and letting ning improve or one of the many ning competitors to do a better job.
The net is advancing at a faster clip than ever and it is hard to keep up no matter how many resources you can bring to bear on a solution.
With all of nings shortcomings, it still does a great job on Smaller Indiana or http://www.AGreenerIndiana.com. On both of these sites NING has been responsible for making a lot of good things happen in Indiana.
I hear your frustration and agree wholeheartedly, but these things will work themselves out in due course.
I echo what you say about speed and customer service. I suggested to them that they allow me to pay a premium to be on a faster less burdoned server…they said everything is fine. Their own ning community is a bit lacking. They screwed over their early developers building 3rd party apps at the knees. I could go on an on and I cannot disagree with what is said above.
But I will say that NING is better than Joomla, drupel, phpbb, or anything else I have tried.
I think it will improve and I am committed to the platform.
I’m encouraged by the updates they have planned to the Ning platform which you can read on their blog by Gina.
Jeb,
The first wave of RSS fixes went out tonight and, as you wrote, we are reintroducing our Network Creator Network so that we can deliver support as well as communicate everything we’ve got going on more effectively, especially as we start developing the next generation of Ning Networks we’ll launch in the first half of next year.
Robby,
I wanted to address some of your concerns:
1. Notifications not having the comment in them: We can look at doing that but this is the first time I’ve heard we’re so 2006 in doing that and will look into it
2. The iphone interface works without the /m. We figured it out
3. Spam is squarely under control, but there are the occasional attacks we’ll always have to deal with.
4. You shouldn’t be getting 404s when you retrieve old pages. That sucks. Our uptime is over 99% but we can continue to make the service reliable across the board.
In all cases, these are exactly the things you should be pointing out to us because we need to rock them and earn your respect.
I’m perfectly happy to do this
Gina
Gina, thanks for taking the time to respond to this post. I am eager to see Ning do well, I think it is a great platform, it just needs to get up to speed.
The Web moves quickly so a year without a major platform update seems eternal to users and admins. I feel that some of the lag in activity on the Ning communities I monitor could be related to the relative “age” of the platform.
From my observation 2008 was a great year for the Ning platform. People were excited about the concept and the communities that used the platform were active and growing. Now I am seeing that activity and growth dramatically level off despite investments in content, engagement and design upgrades. I have to admit I am beginning to blame the platform.
Facebook is quickly advancing and Twitter has excelled by playing nice with others via its API and feeds. Right now Ning feels very 2007.
I am hopeful that the growing chorus of Ning admins asking for changes will result in a platform that is viable into the future.
I fully realize the difficult challenge of balance the chaos of input with the goals of your business. But in the mix of voices I think there is growing consensus on many items.
thanks again for chiming in.
What can I expect from Ning now? It is plain awful to visit the site and not be able to find the other networks I joined. I thought it was great at first but now I just hate it. I hope they do great but i’m no longer using it nor i will or will promote like I once did thinking it was great. Ning just simply sucks to treat its customers the way they are.
I thought I had found the perfect place to move my site once MSN was done. It was great in the beginning and now it’s a nightmare.. I guess I should be grateful that my support ticket has only been open since Dec 21st as I see some have been open for month’s…. I have had people tell me that it’s Nings Cache that is causing my problem, I have no clue, just know it’s not mine. I need to find a site to move to that has support, cause this just isn’t working.