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Warren Ellis linked to Club of Mars saying it was “probably one of the biggest groups on the Ning system now. Pretty daft for something I only activated as a toy for you all to play with. Huge amount of activity there now, blogging, videos, photo uploads. Plenty to waste that valuable work time with.” I haven’t thought about Ning since it’s first wave of buzz back in (checks) 2005. Then it was a kind of toolbox for building social software applications. Now it seems to have reinvented itself rather nicely as a place where you can “create your own social network” as easily as you might set up a blog or Yahoo group. Also of interest is how they charge for premium services such as using your own domain name and keeping your network away from the wider Ning community. If someone wanted to set up their own MySpace or Facebook or whatever they could do so easily and cheaply here.

That said, I would caution against groups doing this and expecting it to work. You don’t just build something and suddenly everyone who it’s aimed at starts using it. The internet is a big place and everyone’s already settled into their niches of activity. The trick, as I see it, is aggregating, collating and curating that activity, enabling conversations using existing nodes rather than pushing new ones onto people. But that said, there’s nothing wrong with giving it a go and this Ning thing lowers the investment risk substantially.

Another idea for Ning might be short-term social networks. I’m not a big fan of the event-specific blog that just dies after the event has happened. A social network, however, can mirror big events quite nicely. A festival, for example, has a few thousand people having one thing in common for a brief amount of time. After than they then go their seperate ways. A Ning network could mirror that temporal thing quite effectively and when the interest inevitably dies there’s no great loss and you’ve got a permanent snapshot. You could even integrate it into the event itself by including a signup with the ticket sales. My Supersonic Roundup showed what an incredible amount of material is produced by people after an event from reviews to photos to video (so much video!). Imagine if you could get people to contribute it all in one place and start conversations around it? I notice Ning lets you import stuff from Flickr and YouTube rather than uploading it a second time which is a very sensible move on their part, lessening the investment needed to join in.

Anyway, in essence, Ning looks like an interesting tool.