Ning: Close but not quite there
Ning.com is what we consider to be the home of niche social network sites. Ning is home to well over 120,000 different social networking sites which vary in interest from Labradoodle Owners to Social Media Networks to Ninja Secrets. It’s not a stretch to say that if you’re interested in something there is great chance someone has started a network around it.
The idea of being able to join multiple niche social networks with one logon at one location is an excellent idea. The idea of being able to create a nice looking, fully featured social network in under five minutes is a wonderful idea. So how does Ning go wrong? They treat each social network as a completely separate identity almost as if they were on a completely separate network not tied together with Ning.com. That means that if you are a member of three networks and you upload a new picture of you and your cat… it only get’s uploaded to one network. You have to upload it two more times to complete your update on the site. Same thing with blog posts, status updates, videos… everything. It takes away what could have been it’s biggest feature.
There are sites like ping.fm and hellotxt.com have entire business models around the simple principle of keeping multiple networks updated from one central location.
There is the argument that if you post a blog or photo you may not want it to be broadcast to everyone (that new picture of your labradoodle might not go over well with Ninjas) but it would be simple to allow users to choose which of their joined networks the update goes to.
What are your thoughts? Do you like having to login and do the same update multiple times? Do you feel it keeps the networks more personal since it’s not just syndicating the same content?
Tags: blog-network, business social networking, Social Media Marketing