Good things, Ning.
Jun 13, 2008
I was initially skeptical about Ning - whose claims of being able to create your own social network without programming knowledge seemed a bit optimistic.
I take it all back. I finally got around to creating a network for a project which I was consulting on, and I'm really impressed. I think I got the whole thing up and running in about 6 minutes.
Obviously, that's without much in the way of customisation, and I had the logo all done beforehand etc. but still, that's pretty quick.
So Ning Pros:
- Stupidly fast to set up
- Initial site free
- You can request the source code for customising - although you're then on your own in terms of code updates
- Good use of Groups/Forums/Social Profiling, and user management - you can lock down the whole thing to registered users if you want
- Quite simply, this will do *most* people, if they want some community based system
- not so much a con, but you have to pay to remove adverts, use your own domain or subdomain, add extra bandwidth (100GB per month) etc - they've got to make their money somewhere I guess.
- Every event seems to require a picture of some description, which seems pointless.
- Some people are happy on facebook, and don't want yet another social network