Ning passes 200,000 social networks

[Mark Greenfield]

From Marc Andreessen's Blog:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/ning-passes-200.html

How many of you have created a site on Ning for your college or University? Here at UB, we launched one last week for students in our Undergraduate Academies, and we hope to launch another one later this spring.

[Michael Fienen]

Nope. I don't see anything like that happening here in the foreseeable future. We don't even have a Facebook or MySpace presence.

[Karlyn Morissette]

I have to wonder how many of those are active, engaging networks. They say that 70% of them are "active" (or have been "used" in the last 30 days), but just because someone has logged in does not, in my opinion, mean its engaging.

[Richard Orelup]

We are rolling out a Ning network this summer that we will use for our whole campus from incoming students all the way to alumni. We will have custom widgets for the different groups that will allow them to do lots of different things specific to their groups they are in. A great example of this is with our alumni department we are going to have their whole event registration process done through Ning but it's really integrating with a home grown backend that we host on our side which allows us to have a lot of control over both ends. With groups this is going to allow us to customize the experience of lots of different groups but while having them all in one place. So when a student graduates we easily move him from one group to the next automatically and they lose none of what they have gathered over the years and can easily keep in contact with all their past friends through this.

And developing in Ning is pretty simple, though I've been using PHP for a long time so that might be biased. The beauty of it is all the modules they have installed that you can use to handle everything, like curl and SQLite. This opens up a world of integration possibilities that you don't really get from just having your presence on facebook. You can also have control of what people are doing on this as well.

I've just submitted an abstract to eduWEB about what we are doing with this so hopefully it's accepted so I can talk about it more. :)

[Laura]

I'm here at UB- I started a site for our community of Field Educators (School of Social Work). Still playing around with, but goal is to "launch" in April. Our objective is to keep people engaged; create more opportunities for partnership between faculty (school) and professional Social Workers (practice community). I want to polish it up a bit, get user feedback, etc. before telling wider community. The potential is for several hundred users- may serve to help our efforts in staying connected to community...recruiting field educators.

Ning may be low-tech (which works for me), but I have an element of control - in contrast to school web.

Love your site! We are at http://ubsswfieldeducation.ning.com

Laura

[Mark Greenfield]

Nice to see another UB staff member here. Good luck with your site. I've created dozens of Ning sites for a wide variety of organizations. I'd be happy to meet over coffee if you have any questions.

[Richard Orelup]

Funny to see a response to this thread after all this time, especially after I just tweeted this.

http://twitter.com/ripsup/status/9173381298

Went to 4th Ning network sites in a row that were the "go to" place for something that hasn't been updated in 6 months to a year.

[Laura]

That would be fantastic, Mark! You name time and place and I'll be there. May be helpful to hear your views about pros and cons...I've got my work cut out for me in terms of persuading some colleagues.