Playing Softball With Social Networking Insiders
Is it me, or is the NYTimes playing footsy with tech insiders instead of asking hard questions? The puff piece by Brad Stone in today's NY Times makes me want to cancel my subscription.
[from Social Networking’s Next Phase by Brad Stone]The new social networking players, which include Cisco [buying Tribe.net] and a multitude of start-ups like Ning, the latest venture of the Netscape co-creator Marc Andreessen, say that social networks will soon be as ubiquitous as regular Web sites. They are aiming to create tools to let ordinary people, large companies and even presidential candidates create social Web sites tailored for their own customers, friends, fans and employees.
“The existing social networks are fantastic but they put users in a straitjacket,” said Mr. Andreessen, who this week reintroduced Ning, his third start-up, after a limited introduction last year. “They are restrictive about what you can and can’t do, and they were not built to be flexible. They do not let people build and design their own worlds, which is the nature of what people want to do online.”
Let's start with Ning, which Stone suggests has been reintroduced this week. Hold on. I was at Web 2.0 Summit last fall, where is was reintroduced. And I wrote about it at the first launch back in October 2005 (a lifetime ago: it was on my old Corante blog), and then I was involved in the discussion of Ning's deadpool status in January 2006.
It's truly wearisome to have Andreesen pitching the same story about Ning in March 2007, 18 months after initial launch, and 6 months after the relaunch at Web 2.0. But the strangest thing is that Stone doesn't mention any of these dates, or any of the web discussion about Ning.
The story also gladhands the acquistion of Five Across and Tribe.net by Cisco. Even if social networking is in the future for clients of Cisco's hardware, are these technologies likely to form the platform for the next generation solutions that major media and entertainment companies are going to demand? Shouldn't that question at least be asked?
[Update: Om Malik weighs in:
[from Cisco's Wrong Bet On Social Networks]News flash for Cisco: This social software thing – it is too marginal, doesn’t make money and can’t make you cool. Stick to what you know best - plumbing hardware –sell tons of it, make money, and learn to live with the fact that you are rich and old school.
]
Hi Stowe -- I'm sorry to hear you're weary :-).
Here's what we've done:
* We started developing our hosted platform for social networks (which we called social applications at the time -- "social networks" is the term that the world has adopted so we've gone with it) in Oct 2004.
* In Oct 2005 we quietly released the initial version of the Ning platform with a couple of dozen simple social applications that any user could clone and customize in 30 seconds for free. The basics of the Ning platform were in place then -- any app could be customized at any level from HTML and Javascript down into underlying PHP against the Ning API's, or via Web services. But the applications were rudimentary, so we didn't publicize the service (no press release, no launch party, no conference speeches), we just let it virally grow and let people experiment with it while we continued to develop.
* In Oct 2006 we had evolved the underlying platform to the point where it was much more sophisticated and complete -- including a complete set of API's and Javascript/Ajax components for social networking features like friends, contacts, messaging, invitations, notifications, blocking, etc. -- and released three more robust applications (Photos, Videos, and Group). We did a small amount of press at that time and spoke at one conference (Web 2.0) where we also showed the designs for Ning version 2...
* This week we officially launched Ning version 2 and did our first actual press release and press tour (four days on the road). At this point with version 2 we are very happy with the underlying platform which is now an extremely robust and flexible way to build any kind of social network or application, and we are also very happy with our new front end, which is the "your own social network for anything" feature that you see when you go to the home page. All of the prior apps continue to work just like before but our focus with users is encouraging them to use the new social networking application and to use the resulting social networks.
This wasn't a three-month development effort... what we've built and released at this point has a ton of underlying API's and platform capabilities, plus front-end features, that simply take time to develop and bake.
We have, among other things: a scalable schema-less semi-structured content store that lets any application store, retrieve, and manipulate any kind of content or data on the fly (with more than 8 million individual data items currently in that store); complete automatic search and tagging of that data; autogenerated RSS and Atom feeds for all data; user authentication and profile management; all the social networking functionality I mentioned above as platform services; video transcoding and playback; photo processing and slideshows; mobile and email-based uploads of text/photos/video; and tons of other features -- all exposed through a unified REST-based web services API with PHP and Javascript API's layered on top; all supported by a secure embedded PHP runtime environment -- currently running 40,000 user-created social networks, well over 20 million monthly pageviews and 4 million monthly uniques, and growing very quickly. This is all *in addition* to the actual new social networking front-end application that we just developed and launched.
Now that I've subjected you to that last paragraph, I'd encourage anyone reading this to give Ning version 2 a shot at www.ning.com and see what you think. Please feel free to email me your thoughts at pmarca at our company name dot com.
Posted by: Marc Andreessen | March 03, 2007 at 05:10 PM