If you are a member of a niche social network, there is a very good chance that it has been created using the Ning platform. A clever company with a bit of a silly name, Ning provides a platform for anyone to create a social network, for free, related to any topic that they could possibly want. The beauty of the application is that it offers everything a community manager could need, from discussion forums, the ability for people to build profiles and friend one another, photo and video uploads, blogs and groups, all for the bargain price of absolutely nothing.
Because it is so easy to create a niche social network on Ning, lots of people started doing it. And like lots of people, I (as a multifaceted person, which I am immensely proud of) discovered more than one Ning site which grabbed my interest. There are Ning sites for every single one of my hobbies and a whole host of hobbies that I don’t have. Where my problem was – which I suspect is the perennial problem for almost everyone who engages with social media – was that they began to get out of hand. In order to accept friend requests, read messages or receive updates, I had to go to each and every site individually.
This is what I love about social media evolution – when a problem arises, someone comes along and fixes it. I had just finished writing the course chapter on Ning and niche social networks, when one of our delegates emailed me in confusion, saying that although what I had written was quite clear, he couldn’t quite figure out what to do on Ning, as it all seemed different. I went to Ning and lo and behold, they had changed their interface (rendering my new chapter out of date!) and what a change for the better it is.
Ning now provides a personal dashboard for you to see and respond to activity on all of your Ning communities at once. When you log into Ning now you are faced with a screen giving you the latest updates from all of your communities, the ability to view messages, no matter what community they were sent in, the ability to accept friend requests from all sites, and even recommendations and invitiations to other, similar communities from your network. As frustrated as I was about having to rewrite the chapter, this is one change that has made life just so much easier for anyone who is a member of more than one niche community.
I understand why sites need to upgrade – nothing stays still online (and nor should it) but sometimes the upgrades barely seem necessary. Sometimes upgrades make things worse, or solve some problems while causing a whole host of new ones to arise. And every now and then, and upgrade just streamlines things in the right way, so that each time you go to it you feel yourself sigh with pleasure. Good work, Ning.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0270f586-a690-488c-bd0c-4d1d4472165d)
If you like this post, why not subscribe to our RSS Feed. Or you can visit our main website at Tiger Two or follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed
Tags: Community, Ning, Social Media, Social network
