Axel Bruns on why Ning trumps Facebook

Very interesting critique of Facebook by Axel Bruns. After the critique in the first part, Axel focuses on why Ning solves a number of the outlined problems. Read the full entry here.

Why Ning is better than Facebook:

One alternative to Facebook which allows for such collective processes (without attempting to ensnare and hijack the hive) is Ning – a relatively new site I’ve grown very fond of over the last month or so. (Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen is one of its founders.) Rather than existing as a generic site for the conduct of sociality, centred around the individual, its fundamental unit of operation is the social network community, and Ning supports some 185,000 such communities now, from the P2P Foundation community to the SXSW ’08 Insider’s Guide. This solves many of the problems associated with massive ‘flat’ sites like Facebook: it enables individual users to attach themselves to a number of different communities (or start their own), and allows these communities to develop their own protocols for social networking and interaction.

Ning can be described in short, therefore, as a kind of ‘Facebook done right’. On Facebook, social capital in the network is measured mainly on a quantitative basis: the more friends you have, the more of a network hub you are. Qualitative aspects – strong or weak ties, and the context of your connection with another person in the network – hardly get a look in: all links in the network are virtually equal, and thus ultimately equally meaningless. On Ning, the balance is reversed: it’s the communities you belong to, and the meaningful contributions you make to those communities, that indicate your place in the network – not the friendship scores you rack up on your profile page.

And Ning is anything but a walled garden. Its boundaries are immensely permeable in both directions – in the form of RSS feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube clips, and other materials, content can be drawn into Ning easily, but what happens on Ning is also instantly visible to users on the wider Web (there’s even a widget for posting Ning activity to Facebook), so that community interaction doesn’t have to stop where Ning stops. (That said, Ning sites can be set to ‘private’, though.) Ning can be just one element – a central hub, aggregator, forum, perhaps – in a federated network of personal and collective blogs, wikis, collaborative project sites, and there’s no requirement for all members of that federation to commit to it.

Also following that federated, cross-site logic, Ning has begun rolling out support for Google’s nascent OpenSocial API framework, which – put very simply – detaches social networking applications and activities from the sites and platforms they’re running on, and has been touted as Google’s way of galvanising a loose collection of open and interoperable social networking platforms into a strong alliance that can offer a vigorous challenge to Facebook’s walled garden model. Little comfort for those still caught in Facebook’s maelstrom, but excellent news for those of us who believe that the open flow of information is infinitely preferable to proprietary lock-down.

Frankly, in my view, Facebook’s walled garden approach ultimately perverts the idea of social networking, of social interaction, of sociality itself; however popular it may be today, I fear that as its inner workings become more and more obvious, we’ll find that that Facebook is giving social networking a bad name. Ning, and other sites like it, go some way towards reclaiming the idea of social networking by providing a more sensible, sustainable, and indeed social alternative.”

1 Comment Axel Bruns on why Ning trumps Facebook

  1. Avatarryan

    with it’s walled approach FB seems more like a web1.0 solution than the open idea of web2.0…I fled FB with the exception of scrabulous 😉 a while ago and now participate on a few ning networks.

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