I’ve been experimenting a little with Ning lately. If you’ve not heard of Ning before, they’re a “Social Network In A Box”. You can knock up a reasonably full-featured Social Network site on a subject of your choice in about 5 minutes.
I’ve got a couple going at the moment as companion sites to my blogs. You can see the diversity of the themes available on the two I’ve set up at The Chess Player and World Of Simulation.
Both feature a forum, so it can save you the trouble of setting one up on your main site. I’ve also included the RSS feed from my main sites, so you’ve got ready made self-promotion thrown in, too. You can easily add a photo/video gallery. And you can set the whole thing up so you have to authorise all submissions before they make it to the site.
They’ve recently released a new “version”, which includes additional themes and redesigned sections such as forums, groups etc.
One thing that is missing, even following the update - and a lot of people over on the Ning forum are requesting it - is a chat module. Sure, you can easily embed something like a Meebo room, but it doesn’t blend very well and is not “connected” to the Ning network as such. People still have to log-in seperately.
The basic network creation is all free, but supported by Google ads. You can pay extra and have these removed and include your own ads if you like. You can also, for a small fee, attach the Network to your own domain and remove any references to Ning.
So, will it last? Too early for me to tell for my own sites yet, as I only have a handful of members and they’ve only been going for a few days. However, the number of networks being created on Ning tells me they’re here to stay. As a simple and quick method of adding social networking facilities to your site, they’re pretty hard to beat at the price.
