Ning nixes naysayers nicely now (and moon egg)

On the Ning nang nong, Wednesday's IT Blogwatch goes "bong": in which Marc Andreessen's social network creator launches. Not to mention Insanity Prawn Boy making a veritable mockery of The Toast King's moon Easter egg hunt...

Michael Arrington crunches the story:

I have to hand it to Ning - it took them well over a year after their initial beta launch to fulfill their promise of allowing “anyone” to create social applications, but they’ve done it. Ning relaunches tonight with new functionality and an interface that allows even the most novice of web users to create their own highly customized social network in moments.

Until today, creating new applications in Ning required at least some programming knowledge, unless you simply cloned an existing application ... [but] after seeing a demo earlier this afternoon, I’m now willing to offer a full mea culpa. The new Ning is an impressive and useful service. Ning can be used to create a fully functional and customized social network in minutes ... It’s completely free, and Ning offers a la carte upgrades like the ability to add your own Google Adsense code for $20/month, and domain name aliasing for $5/month.
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The company remains privately financed, mostly from Marc Andreessen, who’s put $9 million or so into Ning to date.

Harry McCracken calls Ning, "Neat":

Until last week, I was only vaguely aware of the Web service knownas Ning--and the main thing I knew was that it had been co-founded by Marc Andreessen, the man without whom the Web as we know it might not exist ... [It] sounds gimmicky and faddish, and in fact, Ning looks wonderfully practical. It seems to me to be a logical successor to old-line Web services like Yahoo Groups and Google Groups--a way for people to create an online meeting place for kindred spirits who share an interest.

This new version of Ning has a nifty. AJAX-y user interface that lets you build a social network by dragging and dropping features, such as blogs, forums, and videos into place. There are plenty of templates (and plenty of customization options, from color schemes to the ability to plug in your own HTML). You can make your network public or private, and every member gets a persona page which he or she can further customize.

Om Malik adds:

Ning ... has been under close scrutiny by the Silicon Valley cognoscenti. The Palo Alto-based start-up has played its cards close to its chest, a move that has left many scratching their heads ... Ning’s strategy at best could be described as quixotic. [They] are betting that Ning 2.0 will help lift the mists of confusion. The company has taken its wide array of offerings – video aggregation, photo albums, weblogs, forums, sausages and sauerkraut – and has come up with what amounts to a 15-minute Social Network.
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There are some of us who believe that the social networks are getting rapidly commoditized, and becoming what amounts to being a feature. That is not necessarily a bad thing – since it means the focus is squarely on the vibrancy of community. 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.

Chris Mohney grins:

After impressing almost no one for so, so long, Ning has relaunched and reclaimed the hearts and minds of techbloggers. Ning allows the free construction of Facebookesque social networks, customizable with a variety of content and content sources. Construction tools are dead easy, using a drag-and-drop layout similar to Typepad. Ning -- largely funded by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and cofounded by Web 2.0 hottie Gina Bianchini -- is banking on the contextual ad market to support the site (though subscribers can sell their own ads by forking over a few bucks). Fortunately for nostalgia's sake, some of Ning's early triumphs remain intact -- for example, Who Is a Bigger Douche.

And here's Gina Bianchini herself. Would: [You're fired -Ed.]

Today we had a database bug that we introduced last night when we were finalizing the release of Ning Version 2. We've seen it twice today which in both cases have slowed the networks on Ning down to a crawl ... we're seeing a fairly simple deadlock that is the result of our interconnected databases and storage systems.

This particular deadlock jams up an important component in Ning and the deadlock starts to propagate through the system as people intermix operations that depend on the lock and others that don't, creating further locks. As anyone who's done multithreading knows deadlocks can be hard to reproduce which is why we missed the windows to fix it before it had an impact on you.

Robert Scoble has video:

Here we talk with Marc Andreessen (yeah, the Marc who started Netscape) and co-founder Gina Bianchini, about a whole raft of things from what this new release enables users and developers to do to trends these two are seeing on the Internet.

The Head Lemur hates the idea:

From out of the bowels of Palo Alto California and the brain of Marc Andressen comes NING! The latest in a long line of Sharecropper Social Networks ... Sharecropping is alive and well on the Internet. Here the Plantation Owners call them Social Networks. In the case of the internet, the exchange is not in your favor, nor is it close to passing the smell test ... You join one of these ... and you can share your stuff ... but you grant the plantation owner a non-exclusive, worldwide, license to reproduce, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display your stuff.

None of these sites are created for the people. These are, to the last picture, file, and pixel solely created as businesses to make money for the plantation owners. Three Card Monte, Multi Level Marketing, Ponzi Schemes have nothing on these deals ... Sorry boys and girls, No Pony. It is just another room filled with sh**. They place ads around your stuff, and deliver eyeballs to advertisers in the electronic version of valpack coupons and junk mail.

While Ray Grieselhuber gives it a resounding "Meh":

[Ning] feels like someone is giving me the fuselage of a plane and telling me to fly. Pinning down what makes high-growth social networks valuable could probably be someone’s dissertation, but it’s not the availability of features like pictures and video widgets ... in my estimation there are three social networks that are really successful
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The first ... is CouchSurfing.com. Its goal is simple - provide a place online for people looking for a place to crash to connect.
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Next up is Craigslist. Born out of the ideas originating with The Well, I don’t think many people have truly taken the time to understand how revolutionary Craigslist really is.
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Finally, Meetup.com is the site that I never use but highly respect. Their approach to building a place for local, grassroots campaigns ... meets and exceeds my criteria for successful online communities: it encourages offline interaction and views itself as the facilitator of community, not the community itself.

Buffer overflow:

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Previously in IT Blogwatch

• Gates: I need more visas (and flying beer)
• Dell likes Linux? (and <IMG />)
• Apple/Cisco iPhone lovefest (and naked virgins)
• IBM "woman fellow" aces Turing test (and helpdesk.no)
• AMD's CPUs OMG LOL IMHO (and pie HOWTO)
• Older posts

And finally... On The Moon s01e11

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.