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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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