Voici le second article dédié à Ning. J’ai posé quelques questions à Athena von Oech, VP of Community Management chez Ning. J’aurais aimé qu’il ait ait un discours moins marketing, mais bon, je peux comprendre que pour certaines questions, ce soit délicat. Bonne lecture. Troisième et dernier billet demain.
Can you present in a few words the history and the evolution of Ning? When? Who?
Ning was founded in 2004 by Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen. Ning launched its Ning Platform in October 2005. Then, the company launched its “killer app”, Your Own Social Network for Anything, in February 2007. Today, Ning is is the largest provider of social networks on the Internet with over 875,000 social networks on the platform with 3,500 new social networks being created everyday.
Today, Ning provides you with the ability to create your own social network for anything for free. With your own member profiles, your own choice of visual themes, and your own choice of features: photos, videos, events, groups, blogging, discussions, chat, and many more, your social network can be anything you want it to be. You can see a great product overview here.
People are creating their own social networks for many different reasons. They are creating them:
- To interact with loyal fans and enable them to meet each other (Good Charlotte)
- To connect with other people who are interested in advocating for wind energy (Picken’s Plan)
- To share photos and videos of tricked out cars (Dub Pages)
- To connect with other Harry Potter fans (MuggleSpace)
With over 875,000 diverse social networks on the Ning Platform, people are creating networks for every conceivable need, niche, interest, location, and in 24 different languages. The only thing the social networks on Ning have in common is that they are uniquely yours: your brand, your ideas, your choice of features, your visual design, and most importantly, your members and data.
Why was Ning created?
From the start, we wanted to give people the opportunity to create and control their own social applications on a fully customizable platform, with your choice of topic, features, design, and with your members.
Who are the key competitors of Ning?
Ning is a very different kind of social network because we give people the freedom to create their own. As a result, we focus on how we can continue to give both Network Creators and Members of social networks more freedom, flexibility, and options in creating a broadest set of social experiences online today and not on a specific set of competitors.
According to you, what are the major strengths of Ning? And in comparison with its concurrents? What differentiates Ning from the other platforms allowing to create a social network?
With over 875,000 diverse social networks on the Ning Platform, there are more social networks on Ning than on any other Platform. We’ve seen people create networks for every conceivable need, niche, interest, location, and in 24 different languages. We offer Network Creators a steady stream of new features every 2 weeks.
What are the major weaknesses that could enable expansion? And that users ask?
We hear requests from Network Creators and their members for a variety of features for their social networks. We keep the feedback loop short, really listening to the requests we hear for new features and functionality while we constantly iterate and innovate on the product. We then do major feature releases quickly–every 2 weeks– which Network Creators can add to their social networks on Ning. For example, recently, we’ve heard requests from Network Creators for an updated look to the photos, videos, and music players. These players (branded to social networks) are especially useful because Network Creators and their members can embed them anywhere on the web with a click and they all link back to the social network so it’s a great way to get the word out about your social network. Last night we released redesigned players with icons that match the colors of the social networks. The feedback has been really positive.
What are the next main functions you should implement in Ning and you can talk about?
We’re working on a couple of big releases over the next few months or so.
We’ll be launching Ning Apps which will enable third party developers to create new features that Network Creators can add to their social networks. Ning Apps will be seamlessly added to a network’s Main page, have their own tab and display multiple “canvas” pages for the feature itself. At launch we’ll have over 30 Ning Apps ranging from mobile video streaming to create your own store apps to social games.
We’re also revamping Ning.com to provide a simple, easy way to keep up with all of your social networks across the Ning Platform, as well as links to recommended networks for you join.
These are just the larger projects we’re working on - we’ve also got a ton of smaller features and functionality coming out over the same time period! You can find more information about these upcoming features on this recent blog post our CEO, Gina, wrote.
What is the biggest social network created on Ning? (number of members)
There are a number of large networks on the Ning Platform with hundreds of thousands of members including 50cent’s social network thisis50.com and the Pickens Plan . A quick view on Ning.com shows off a few others.