Ning: The Next Big Thing In Social Networking

Maybe some of you haven't heard of Ning.com. I expect that you will be hearing about it soon enough. According to Compete.com, they had over 2M unique visits for May 08. They've got that hockey stick graph curve that execs everywhere drool over because numbers keep going up and up, and quite frankly, if you're looking to lay money on the next big thing in social networking, I'd put it on Ning.

What is Ning? For those of you just getting up to speed, they're a social networking Web site that allows you the freedom to develop a community around any topic. I'm in about six different ning groups from social media to wine tasting (don't ask me how I got in this one, I don't even drink wine). While MySpace and Facebook give you the ability to join up with everybody and their dog, Ning gives you the flexibility to develop communities around niche topics. And it's not just a crappy forum; I've seen and had my fill of crappy, poorly designed forums, although you can add a forum to your Ning group if you absolutely have to have one. Each individual ning group is different and it may ask for different details from you, depending on how the Ning creator set it up. You also get your own page within each group. Some of the design won't knock your socks off, but then, you also have quite a bit of control over editing and changing the design.

Ning understands that its about niche topics on the Web. They've created an agile platform that puts more control in individual users' hands and allows them to create the communities that they want to create. Essentially, Ning allows thousands of mini-facebooks and mini-myspaces.

At this point, I'm not sure that there will be another huge social networking site until there are bigger changes in the knowledge base of Internet users. For instance, maybe a second life type social network would eventually replace a facebook or myspace, but only after enough Internet users had the skills to use it or they'd made it more user-friendly.

Niche, specific topics (communities dedicated to lawns, dark beer, firefox, etc.) are going to be the driving forces in the Web as so many large, catch-all portals have become established. The real opportunities down the road for Internet visionaries will be to create platforms and sites that allow people to tailor them even more closely to their interests and the interests of their communities.