Ning is a website designed to help us to build our own social
networks.  It launches officially next week.  It’s the work of Marc
Andreessen (pictured) and Gina Bianchini.

Ning looks promising on three dimensions:

1) the business model

Ning
allows for "revenue access," let’s call it.  If we have basic
membership, Ning will place ads on our sites and keep the revenue.  For
a fee, we can run ads of our own and keep their revenue.  (MySpace has
no revenue access opportunity.) 

Revenue access and revenue
sharing are pressing issues, and this is the clearest leverage point
that will supplant first generation social networks with subsequent
ones. 

YouTube makes clear that consumers are happy to supply
content for nothing.  They consider themselves well paid by the
opportunity for exposure and the intrinsic pleasure of content
creation. 

But this will not endure.  Eventually, the internet
mediators are going to have to pay the content provider just as surely
as the old mediators now do. 

Ning may eventually be obliged
to compensate even those who use the basic package, but that remains to
be seen.  We shall see where the YouTube experiment ends up on this
one. 

The anthropological angle: when content providers have
access to revenue, how will they use it?  There’s a good chance that
some providers will hew to the middle of the market, in order to
increase their revenues.  This will narrow the world that the internet
represents.  But it is also true that some content providers will use
the revenue to free themselves from their "day jobs" and pursue their
innovations with new enthusiasm.  As a result, the internet will become
more innovative and more various. 

2) the user model

The
user model looks right as well.  Ning will allow user customization and
control.  (And there is of course a powerful anthropological impulse at
work here. The DIY movement is one of the great transformative trends
of our times.)

Other social
network sites ask you to join their world. We are about people creating
their own worlds. (Gina Bianchini, Ning CEO)

But
Ning doesn’t merely allow customization and control, it has the good
sense to allow us to scale up into this customization and control.
True there are some internet users like Steve Rubel who are just all
over the technology and the opportunities this technology opens up.
But most of us are more like me, poor schlups who are just one new
feature or one fat manual away from a terrible headache and long term
memory loss. 

For these people, "keeping it simple, stupid" is
the order of the day.  Google gets this.  Marissa Mayer is the high
priestess of simplicity and one of the reasons the Google search engine
is a thing of beauty while Yahoo and eBay websites leave me with the
strong feeling that a bomb must have just exploded in my dog’s
breakfast. 

Ning has taken a page from the Google handbook:

The
whole point of providing customization and freedom is that you want to
give people something super simple at first but then, as they get more
sophisticated, you want to give them the ability to get more creative.
(Andreessen)

There is another way to put this.  All of
us want all of the expressive and pragmatic advantages that come with
all of the new technologies, but none of us has an additional ounce of
intellectual processing power to spend on them.  It’s not actually that
we’re stupid.  We’re are overextended.

Starting simple removes every piece of extraneous intellectual effort.
And scaling up allows us to recoup that effort over and over.  Now we
may use what we know to acquire new knowledge.  Most of the wayfaring,
the pondering, the "how does this work, again?" has been removed.  The
"fog of technology" has been made to lift.   

And once schlubs like me have access to the expressive potentialities of
the new technology, we may expand the internet and the worlds now suspended from this internet to expand extraordinarily.   Once civilians can be as
inventive as the experts…wow.  And this is what the the new technology does
so well.  It creates solutions for one generation which it then learns to automate for the
next generation.  Second Life has yet to make it easier for the novice
to build on line.  Once it does so, that little world, already so stuffed with design experiment, will expand remarkably. 

So there is an anthropological angle here too.  Once Ning and other sites
help to empower the ordinary user, the web will become still more fecund.   Andreessen
has contemplated this future. 

To get philosophical for a minute, I
believe (as Milton Friedman says) that human wants and needs are infinite. There
are no limits to the things and services that people want or need, so there are
no limits to the number of new technologies, companies, and industries we can
create. The questions are: how many people worldwide are able to contribute, how
much capital is available to them, and how free are they to pursue new
ideas?

3) the cultural model

As
it stands, social networking doesn’t actually sort very well.  And this means social networks on the web don’t make
social connections very well.  (I have met lots of people through the
web.  Some of them are now my friends.  But I have yet to make a friend
thanks to a social network site.  How bout you?) 

This has got to be a temporary problem.  If there is something that the web
should be good at, it is helping me to find all but only the people I
find really interesting.  But really good networks, networks with very high "friend potential," are small networks, and
small networks have hitherto failed to attract the resources to make them go.  Ning appears to change all that and we
may now expect to see online networking take on new significance. . 

There is one further anthropological note to offer here.  When there is
a network for each of my enthusiasms, what happens to those enthusiasms?
I think it is probably true that each of them will broaden and deepen, and I think
this tells us that each enthusiasm will make an even greater claim upon the self. 

Or, let’s put this another way.  Let’s say my self now consists of
several quite distinct creatures.  At a minimum, there’s a blogger, the
ethnographer, the consultant, the person interested in Elizabethan
England, the anthropologist, movie buff, and so on.  Once there is a network for
each of these selves, and once each of these selves becomes as a result
more robust, I think the diversity of my selfhood multiplies and the
absolute space of this selfhood expands.  We may expect better social
networks to create cloudier selves.

Welcome, Ning.

References

Anonymous Reuters.  2007.  Ning allows DIY social networks.  PC Magazine. February 27, 2007. here.

McCracken,
Grant.  2006.  France after France.  This Blog Sits At The Intersection
of Anthropology and Economics.  March 28, 2006. here.

Tischler,
Linda.  2005.  The beauty of simplicity.  Fast Company.com.  Issue
100.  here. 

Steve Rubel here.   

Webb, Cynthia.  An interview with Marc Andreessen.  Washington Post.  June 10, 2004. here.