Ning Social Networking: Wordpress meets MySpace : Texxors.com

Ning Social Networking: Wordpress meets MySpace

June 15, 2007 Posted by Bryan in : New Products, Reviews , trackback, Email this post

In a recent post in the forums reader olhaok mentioned the Ning social networking site. My first thought was, “That thing’s still around?” When I first came across Ning several months ago it was very rough around the edges. The concept was interesting but the implementation was very poor. I expected it would soon get lost in the flood of new social networking sites that were emerging at the time.

The idea behind the service was good enough: to offer a full-featured, free, online content management system and social networking service (think Wordpress meets MySpace or MyBlogLog), but it just didn’t seem like it could recover from some serious design flaws.

Given my initial impression of the service I had to go see what was keeping this site alive.

Whereas a few month ago the site was very user unfriendly and buggy, it looks like they’ve gotten a lot of the major issues worked out. For one, they seem to have moved to a simpler templating system that makes site design much easier, but still allows for quite a bit of variety in color schemes. You’re still pretty limited as far as structure goes, but no more so than a MySpace page. They’ve also added widgets for all of the basic website functions required these days - blogging, forums, and video and music sharing.

To test the service out I set up a TexxorsTime community. (It’s always TexxorsTime!) Pop on in and help us test out this new version of the service.