Ning (website) - Features

Features

Ning appeals to people who want to create their own communities and social networks around specific interests with their own visual design, choice of features and member data. The central feature of Ning is that anyone can create their own social network for a particular topic or need, catering to specific membership bases or community needs. People joining a Ning Network have their own profile pages within the community.

A Ning community can integrate with online services like Facebook, Twitter and Google. For instance, people can join a Ning Network using their Facebook or Twitter account, and share content from a Ning Network directly to their Twitter or Facebook accounts. Members can embed content directly from these services to a Ning Network, as well as other services and media content, like Youtube and Vimeo videos, or music players from MySpace or SoundCloud.

At its launch, Ning was a free-form platform for the development and hosting of open-source "social applications." The source code for Ning applications was available to users, and the service made it easy for anyone to fork a Ning application, modify its PHP code and run it as their own. Applications included photo albums, blogging software, and many for sharing business reviews. In late September 2006, Ning narrowed its focus to offering a group website, a photos website, and a videos website for people to copy and use for any purpose. These three templates were later superseded by a single customizable application aimed at enabling anyone to easily create their own social network. However, Ning does allow developers to have some source level control of their social networks, enabling them to change features and underlying logic.

Feature modification was temporarily disabled on October 21, 2008. The company will replace full source control with the ability to bring in new features or change the logic of existing features via OpenSocial and a set of new APIs relaunched in early 2009.

Ning formerly had both free and paid options; it switched to three levels of paid service in April 2010. Each pay level allows for different degrees of features, viral tools, customization, and customer support.

The social networks running on Ning's service are programmed with PHP and the platform itself is built in Java.

In November 2008, Ning announced a partnership with Scripts4Ning, integrating the developer's products directly into Ning and offering them for free.

Ning network administrators can select from options that govern various levels of viewability, privacy and membership.

Ning added an iPhone interface in March 2009, then made networks more compatible with mobile phones in August 2009. In October 2010, Ning launched an iOS application (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) for network administrators to use to manage their social networks.

In February 2011, Ning introduced a new way for customers to customize and change the appearance of their Ning Networks by launching the Ning Design Studio. The feature allows customers to choose from pre-made templates, varying in color, font, background and foreground images, and layout design. Customers can fine-tune and make changes to the templates, or use CSS to make custom visual changes on their community. The Design Studio also made it possible for customers to change the column layout and widths, giving new options beyond the default 3-column layout on Ning Networks before the Design Studio.