Social Network for me, Social Network for you
When I was only a child, my parents use to tell me that if I was a good boy and had lost one of my teeth that I should put them under my pillow. Then I was to go to sleep and while I was asleep a magically fairy would come and take the tooth and replace it with something even better. Money? No. This fairy gave all the good children their own Social Network.
Unfortunately I would find out that this fairy didn’t exist and I never got that Social Network I always wanted. Luckily later in life my prayers were answered and God invented Ning (he’s behind all tech startups isn’t he?) Now I could create as many social networks as I wanted, and it didn’t even cost me a tooth (maybe a bit of my soul but that’s what you make deals with God for right?) Now I was ready to take on the world, or atleast Friendster, with my new found power.
Why does every website have to be it’s own social network now? I think Ning is actually making the web a worst place. Web 2.0′s Geocities
When Ning first came out I was all about it. I even convinced our school to use it for their alumni network. It was awesome because, as a PHP developer, I could basically do whatever I wanted with the site and get it to interact with our backend systems in ways not really possible in other solutions. It saved us from rolling our own.
Later they took this away from us (I have to assume some people were abusing this pretty bad) and it basically became a worthless tool that we could barely use. At that point, frustrated, I walked away from it and didn’t much care.
That was till recently where it seems that Ning has just gone through the roof with tons of networks for everyone. Basically everyone wants to create a network and have everyone else join, but yet those people they want to join created their own network they would rather have you join. While it sucks to be in a walled garden of other networks, at least there isn’t a power struggle to control it. As well you don’t have to worry about whomever running it disappearing. Now it seems I’m always getting directed to Ning sites that are not kept up and noone has done anything with in forever. It feels like I am stumbling onto an Internet archeological find.
Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization
These sites all look the same (horrible.) While you can do customizations to the look, most don’t, and those that do seem to be the same people who have degrees in design from the Myspace School of Graphic Design. When there is really no barrier for entry these things are created with little thought on if they will be actually used. All the “idea people” can just go wild with their next Facebook for “single mom’s who breastfeed in public and hate that people get annoyed with them” support group.
So basically what we are looking at is a the new Geocities, a wasteland of easily created and even more easily forgot sites that will just waste away till the end of time (or Yahoo pulls the plug.) Actually now that I think about it, where were all the Terry Shivo peeps when Yahoo took away Geocities feeding tube? They had about the same level of activity going on inside of them? You would think they would have been just as upset at the death of another one of God’s creations.
Sadly, with every new iteration of the Web (are we on 7.0 yet? I mean AOL is like in double digits why can’t the web keep up with AOL) we will get some new site that automates doing whatever the new thing is for the lay man. But what will this give us? When the level of entry is to low all you get is garbage from people think they have a great idea for something they will never keep up with.
So hopefully things will come around and Ning will clean up the garbage, but most likely that will never happen. How can you get more VC if you got rid of 75% of your sites because they are garbage. But hey, for the record, I think I’m actually winning in my battle to be bigger then Friendster, maybe the world will be next.
