Ning's Bianchini: The rest of the story

In my interview with Ning's CEO Gina Bianchini this week we covered a lot of ground, including what makes Ning's social networking model different, why some businesses are using the service, and why women executives appear to be doing so well in high-tech companies like Ning.

But quite a bit fell onto the cutting room floor. What will social networks look like in five years? Who will survive the coming shakeout? And won't users get tired of adding their data to ever more social networks - could social networking fatigue be the next big thing?

Here's what she had to say.

What will social networking sites look like in five years?

I think it will continue to mirror the evolution of the Web and that is the best example and predictor of the future. There will be millions of social networks and they will come in all shapes and sizes and they will be for all purposes.

Fundamentally it's just the next generation of what people have been doing since the first online bulletin boards. That to me is what makes it fun and exciting. It's human nature online that just keeps getting richer and better and more sophisticated in new and interesting ways.

How much of what the user posts is Ning willing to make portable so that users don't have to recreate it on every social network they join?

Ning is a little bit different in the sense that you join multiple social networks using the same user account. We actually create it so that you can use a set of things that you want to contribute to every one of the social networks that you belong to on Ning, plus additional information that's relevant to the context of that social network. It's kind of what you do in the real world, and we're trying to mimic the real world in that sense.

At some point won't asking people to enter the same information over and over again on different social networks outside of Ning lead to network fatigue?

I think the issue of social network fatigue is a bit specific to people who are early adopters that are joining six, seven, ten social networks on different services today. The reason for that is that those are general, one-size-fits-all social networks that are looking for the exact same information. That is a very different experience than if you're joining a teen social network or a wakeboarding social network on Ning, where you can contribute the same information over and over again but also differentiate it based on that context. I think the vast majority of people on the Web have been OK joining these services and [using] the different passwords. I'm not saying that works for everybody but certainly it works for the vast majority of people and will continue to work for the vast majority of people.

But don't you see a world where maybe I want to have a central repository of data about me that I control and replicate out a consistent set of information to different services? Why replicate what's in LinkedIn all over again in Facebook and in Ning social networks if I can write it once, read it everywhere?

I'm speaking to Ning and the Ning platform. I absolutely see the point in terms of between Ning, LinkedIn and Facebook you're replicating that information over and over again. People have joined multiple Web sites, they have multiple identities across different commenting systems and I don't think it's any better or worse with what's already happened on the Web. There's absolutely a group of passionate people who want that portability [but] I would suggest that the vast majority of people today at least are pretty comfortable with the fact that they have different accounts and different IDs and different passwords across different Web sites.

With so many networks there's bound to be a shakeout at some point. Should people be concerned about spending a lot of time and energy putting information into social network services where content is stored on a startup's server - and where that whole structure could just go away one day?

I would say that about the whole Web. I think there will be a shakeout in the world of general one-size-fits-all [social networks]. But even there, Friendster and Hi-5 and Facebook and MySpace and Plaxo, they all have a different, passionate base. From my perspective each of those services should be able to continue to exist.

There will be some consolidation. You don't want to be the small guy in a general, one-size-fits-all world. But I absolutely believe that there will be millions of social networks for every conceivable need, interest, location. And the reason for that is that's how people operate in the real world. So if you've created something that's unique, like Twitter Moms [a Ning social network] or something you've built in the real world and want an online presence, I don't think there's going to be a shakeout in that respect.

I also think that 20 or 50 or 100 different flavors of social network for any given topic should and can exist because they're [created by] different people in the same way that there are parties happening all over the world at any given time around the things that people are passionate about. My book club and my mom's book club are very different but we both have a social network.

I don't think we're going to live in a world with three social networks.

Do you see a world coming where instead of uploading pictures to each social network there becomes a broker or central repository from which I link selected photos to different sites?

There might be. I'm not sure. That would be one of the fun things to figure out. But generally speaking, small, specialized, and distributed wins on the Web.