Ning versus Live Spaces and Yahoo Groups

Ning, a social networking platform,  has relaunched today with new features. Ning was founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. Marc was the founder of Netscape and LoudCloud so Ning warrants special attention. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch has come around to liking Ning after first panning it as a dead application. Robert Scoble has a video interview with Marc and Gina.  Om Malik says "

Ning 2.0 is also a challenge to current crop of blogging tools that are still not waking to the new reality, and continue to live like content management systems. The big challenge for Ning will be to get mass adoption, for upon that “adoption” hinges its business model.

The company plans to charge $19.95 a month if you want to run your own ads (or no ads at all). Your own domain will cost $4.95 a month, and a package of 5 GB storage/100 GB of bandwidth is going to cost $9.95 a month. At these prices, Ning will need thousands of social networks before it can join an elite network of start-ups of recent vintage that are profitable.

Haven't we seen this before? After reading some of the reviews and visiting the Ning site I stopped to think for a minute. Hmmm...haven't we seen this before? Yahoo Groups and Live Spaces, formerly MSN Spaces, have been around for a long time. Then I made a list of the Ning features and compared them to Yahoo and Live Spaces. They are virtually the same. Here is my incomplete list;

• Discussion forums
• Blogs
• Photos
• Video
• Polls
• Advertising
• Members
• Member pages
• Privacy settings
• Customization
• Management dashboard

Ning, like Yahoo Groups and Live Spaces is free. Ning will make its money by selling advertising, up-selling additional features like extra bandwidth, and using your own domain name.

The promise of Ning is customization. Ning is building out a platform that will support a variety of social applications that can be customized with your own code and scripts. The current version has feature parity with most of the big payers. I expect Ning will raise the bar with more sample applications and more customization options in the future.

There are lots of choices. Blogging platforms like TypePad, Blogtronix, and Community Server, are great platforms today, but will need to continue innovating to remain viable competitors. Yahoo Groups and Live Spaces have millions of users today, but will likewise need to stay current. Jeremiah Owyang has compiled a list of over 40 social networking application platforms, including the six listed above.

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Comments

[Jeremiah Owyang]

Thanks for the link, that list took a while to compile!

[Jason Rubenstein]

No kidding - that had to have taken a while to compile.

Ning is getting a ton of free PR on blogs in the last 48 hours and their site is down!

Not good.

[Gina Jorasch]

There are many group services in the market that have similar features, but

www.nexo.com

is a new one that has some distinctive advantages.

1 - real-time updating, no refreshing needed, all changes occur for all users right away, no separate edit mode, this is particularly cool when multiple people are chatting on a site at the same time

2 - fine grained privacy/permissions - specific content blocks can have different permissions than the rest of the page or the site, users can define different roles for their groups

3 - customization which doesn't just mean picking from a template of choices, but being able to highly customize even that template for images, colors, look, etc.

4 - truly collaborative site creation and maintenance, owners can define who can see and do what

In addition, nexo.com has all the other features you have listed above and a similar business model. It just launched at DEMO last month.

Hundreds of millions of groups are still not online, so the existing solutions are clearly not meeting the market need yet.

[Lloyd Budd]

If Typepad is a platform what does that make WordPress? The leaders in the blogging "platform" space are Movable Type and WordPress.

PS. Your blockquote is messed up. It makes it look like the image + your "Haven't we seen this before?" are from Om, particularly in my feed reader that styles blockquotes differently.

[Don Dodge]

Lloyd, You are correct, WordPress and MovableType are excellent blog platforms. I didn't mean for that sentence to list all blog platforms, just to convey the idea that Ning has competitors in the blog space as well as the community space. Although, I should have mentioned the leaders. Thanks for pointing that out.

TypePad does have some formatting issues, so I'm not surprised that my blog looked different on your reader. Again, thanks for pointing that out. Not sure what I can do about it though.

[David Cambra]

This has given me a few more things to think about. I began working on a Ning space over a week ago and was interrupted by some personal things to take care of before I could pick it up again. My memory of Ning was zip in terms of capabilities--thanks for the list above--and same for how to get assistance/Qs answered before spinning one's wheels forever--this is my first foray into setting up ANY kind of site, and I now have need for 2 - 3 sites, not just a page, and I haven't gotten past having an "In construction" gif posted for me and I've been on the net since '93 and around computers for accounting/finance/inventory since the punched-tape service bureaus.

I am sure there are user-groups for blog creation or 'Ning Space Creation for Dummies' out there but 193,890 hits on a search is not a good start--I know, just DIVE in, but I've been stuck spinning wheels before on small -> large projects and NOT FUN.

Any direction/guidance to particularly elementary 'help sites' that really let/help you get to the 'Ah! Ha!' moment early on that lets one take off early on their own would be most appreciated.

Thanks from this NEW reader for your summary of Ning--was on 1st page on my Google search "Ning vs. Myspace"...

David Cambra