Review of Ning – the online social networking platform
I thought I might share with you my personal experience on creating a social network on www.Ning.com . Ning is a social networking platform in which anyone can start their own unique online community. As of the time of this article, there are over 100,000 social networks on Ning, with 70,000 of them having been created in just the past seven months alone.
I actually just stumbled upon Ning this summer. I immediately fell in love with the options it provided for someone who wanted to start their own community. It’s an easy way to start an online community for your leads group, your business, your church, or other group. Ning is free to use.
I started a community which you can view at www.PetBoogaloo.ning.com , which is a social networking site for pet enthusiasts. In my easy-to-use control panel, I could create my desired color scheme and graphics. I wanted to provide all the members of my community the ability to add and share their pet videos, pet photos, and to blog about their pets. I also wanted my members to be able to participate in forum discussions, and create to their own groups within the PetBoogaloo community. Every member also has their own profile page, which they can customize even further. Members are able to actively network with each other if they want to.
Adding these features onto PetBoogaloo was easy. I simply selected the features I wanted to provide to my members, and clicked and dragged them to where I wanted them placed on the PetBoogaloo site.
You can also select whether you want your community to be public or private. I’ve noticed that public communities rank very high in the search engines, which is a huge member benefit, particularly if you have business members who want to increase their own website’s search engine rankings.
If you want to get more technical, you can. Ning offers the ability for you to control your own source code. If you or your webmaster wants to further customize the site, you can request and then alter your source code. Initially, I planned on doing that as I loved the option of complete control, but what I found is that once you order the source code, you don’t benefit from all the new features that Ning is constantly providing. With all the current available options, and with the Ning programming team constantly delivering new state of the art features, I decided to go back and have Ning manage the source code instead.
You of course still need to market your community to your desired audience, so that they know you are there. For tips, check out The Dollars and Sense of Online Communities
Does Ning let you use your own domain name?
I’m glad you asked. Yes… they do offer a service where you can have a fully functional domain name on the site.
Nice article Rita. I actually signed up for a Ning network about a year and a half ago when we were trying out many different platforms. Our biggest question was about who owns the content on “your” network? If you have hopes of getting big enough to move onto a proprietary platform this becomes important. It wasn’t clear to me back then. Do you know?
I am pretty sure you own the content. The issue that I think really comes into play, is if you want to move your site to a new platform that is self hosted. If you do that, you can’t take everyone’s login information with you, which means you will have to market to people to get them to rejoin your site. Most likely you would lose the majority of your visitors in that process.
You can also do a Google search for something like ” Web 2.0 scripts ” or “open source social network” , or something to that effect.