I read it in a magazine, so it *must* be true
This month’s issue of Fast Company has given me pause. The cover story, and its sensational headline, are touting Ning.com as being the next revolution in social networking. And when I first read the story, while squinting to filter out the noise (”srsly, if we call it a “viral expansion loop”, people will be impressed and not realize that it’s just a fancypants way of saying word-of-mouth”), I did catch myself thinking this was a rather nifty little idea.
Then I read a little more, I talked to a few more smrt people, and thought about it more, and I have a trio of questions that haven’t been answered. First though, the cool/unique part of ning: it puts the community in control of starting a niche community. That’s neat, but it presupposes that people want to create niche communities that don’t exist. That’s true sometimes, but I think it’s more rare than it is common. I think we’ve learned with the Riders Club and by watching other social networking sites, that people want to join communities for the sense of community. It’s the fact that there are other people there that make it exciting, worthwhile, and fulfilling.
For example: imagine, for a second, if Ning was instead a church: a place where anyone could start their own religion. You’d get some takers, I bet. But the reassurance that most people are looking for comes from the population that’s already there, and I suspect that some might peer into Ning sects with curiosity, but not much more. So this gets to the heart of question #1: under what conditions would people want to start a social network, instead of joining an existing one?
And this brings us to question #2. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, there are conditions that dictate a social network is needed, and somehow, Facebook/Flickr/myspace/linkedin/etc just doesn’t suit the need/culture/features required. Now, one of two things will happen: the community will have 5 or 6 members, and email will remain more effective as a way to communicate, and this new online community will remain unchanged and offline. Or, more optimistically, suppose this social network actually becomes popular because it answers the community needs of a group of people. If the latter is true, why would this community remain on Ning?
But it’s question #3 that really gets me. It seems to me that Ning misses out on something we think we learned early on with the Riders Club: building a niche social network from scratch takes a metric crapton of effort, and it won’t just grow because it’s there. It takes pavement pounding. It takes salesmanship, sweat, convincing, hard work, and most of all, it takes time. And if there isn’t someone tending the hedges every moment of every day, the vines will dry up. Q#3: Who’s going to be the champion of each one of these new social networks? Who’s going to do the work?
I think Ning is cool concept, and I can see it being a “my first social network” tool for small companies. But once traction is achieved, the temptation to bring that community in-house would be huge. And their projections for growth through a “viral expansion loop” seem predicated on an assumption that networks grow by themselves. They most definitely do not. Railroads are networks too, in a way, and no matter how well intentioned, the tracks never laid themselves.