Kiyoshi Martinez - nerdlusus blog the geek wants out

Ning: creating a more personal, effective social network

If you’re on Facebook, like I am, then you’ve probably become more than accustomed to the newsfeed, which embodies the social network definition of “too much information.” The main problem with the newsfeed is the signal-to-noise ratio, and that’s starting to make Facebook gradually less useful. And this is part of a larger problem with social networks.

Whether you’ve decided to join Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or whatever, you probably did so because of a very simple reason: it’s where your friends are hanging out online. Obviously, the main point of social networks is to connect you with your friends — and by extension, to connect you with their friends and use those relationships for some sort of gain.

But now Facebook’s starting to lose its utility. At best, Facebook now works like a toned-down MySpace or an overly blinged-out LinkedIn. Instead of actually helping me stay in touch with my friends, it’s giving more useless information about people I barely know, or don’t really care about but felt somewhat obligated to accept their friend request. And as Facebook inevitably becomes more popular, more people you sort of know will join, friend you and clutter up your newsfeed and waste your time from actually having meaningful interaction.

What do I mean by meaningful interaction on a social network? Right now, Facebook and most other social networks provide you with small amounts of interaction with a lot of people, but the quality of the experience is very disposable and void of valuable discussion. By nature, Facebook’s open and be friends with everyone nature diminishes interaction with people actually interested in you and that you’re interested in.

This occurred to me when I read about Jakob Lodwick’s new project:

It is, and will remain, a private community. … it occurred to us that the Internet used to be nerds-only, by virtue of how obscure and complex it was. Now, every caveman is on it, and finding interesting communities is almost impossible.

After reading that, I thought, “Bingo.” Right now social networks resemble some form of a game, but it does have some value in it that you can actually benefit from. The key, however, is eliminating the bad signal-to-noise ratio and finding a way to make the social network relevant to you and those others you’re with.

Enter Ning. A free service that allows you to create your own social network with a bunch of options. The creation of personal blogs, profiles, photo albums, video uploads, groups and forums. You can use it to start a specialized forum that’s open to the public, like WiredJournalists.com, or create a private social network like I did.

Granted, Ning isn’t the only company offering these services — TechCrunch has a list of nine white-label social networking services — but they offer a great solution for helping you be a part of a social network that you can control. After using Ning to start my own private social network, I’ve found it to be much better experience than using Facebook with the same friends.

For one, it’s private. No worries about employers, co-workers, etc. Second, you can strip out the features you don’t need. Forget about all the applications that people throw on their profiles, all the garbage that doesn’t actually have real, interesting content. Instead, the focus becomes the content and the discussion. Third, because the network’s smaller, it’s more manageable and concentrates your time on contributing and receiving things of actual interest to an attentive audience. Facebook’s newsfeed shouts information to everyone that’s in no way targeted and provides you information you don’t want about people you’re not really interested in knowing that much about.

Ning is a better form of the early Internet forums, where you and your friends gathered, shared and ranted. Facebook, by comparison, is something I’m rapidly losing interest in. Most of my so-called friends on the social network I’m not caring enough about to follow every detail. Facebook substitutes actual interaction between people with gimmicks, games and holiday-ruining advertising. As one of my friends said, he mainly uses it to play Scrabulous, which will might be taken down sometime soon because of copyright issues.

I get why Facebook is popular. People want to bling out their profiles with glitter, play pyramid games of Oregon Trail and rank their friends. It’s a way to kill time and engage in some sort of semi-socially acceptable stalking that our generation’s become accustomed to. But for those of us looking to have a social network that actually provides real utility, we’ll have to move toward a smaller option.

Before Ning and its counterparts, you could use forums, or group blogs. Social networks are the next step in providing that close-knit community. I like that and if you’re looking for a more purposeful solution than the ruckus that’s Facebook and MySpace, I suggest starting your own social network and inviting your closest friends. Limit the community, make it private, build a high level of trust and being making online friendships worthwhile.

(Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.)

Technorati Tags: Ning, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, social+network, signal+to+noise+ratio, forum, group+blog, community, white+label

[...] Primarily, I use Twitter as a way to update my Facebook status. I know, I’m just contributing to the terrible signal-to-noise ratio of Facebook when I do that, but it’s a way for me to pass my time and update friends that are just as addicted to the newsfeed as I am. To do this, I use two keep applications. [...]

Great post!
Ning is awesome, though I think it’s not the best solution for everyone.
Another way of managing your network is by using 8hands, which aggregates all your friends and content, and provides stats about your communication. It’s the simple way for those who doesn’t wanna handle a new social network but still want to have further control over the ones they use.

Thanks for pointing out 8hands.

Not sure how I feel about running another program in addition to my browser just to manage my social networks, but it might work.

The one issue I see is that I use multiple computers, plus a smartphone.

I checked out Ning and although you can create a stand-alone social network, it seems a bit isolating to me. I was looking for something in between Facebook and Ning and found an interesting application called in2community. You create the social network on your existing website but you are networked with other website owners so you can extend the number of people you share common interests with. This is a cool middle ground between the obscurity of Facebook and the complete isolation of a stand-alone Ning social network.

I would like to use your cartoon for an article I am helping with on social networking. Please let me know if this is OK.