Ning

What´s that?
Ning was founded in 2004. As its creators say...
they wanted to see what happen if everyone would have
possibility to create his own social network on the Internet.
The result is over 230,000 social networks nowadays. Topics which connect people in different social networks are really miscellaneous. It starts somewhere around cooking, exchange tips for everything, then continues with networks for fans of celebrities or what ever and ends with career or job networks. The scale of topics is really huge.

How does it work?
You can browse through different networks and look in these public ones without any registration. But if you would like somehow participate in some concrete group or create your own network, you have to sign up and create your own profile. The look of the profile or network depends on you. You could use quite a lot different looks and if you are not satisfied with the offer, you always can use your own CSS code. (That i find really progressive.)
The structure of profile is similar to profiles at Facebook. You could add information about your private life as broad as you wish.

The network has possibilty to add different aplications as for example pictures, discussions, videos and others. The webpage of the network is on the Ning platform and the creating, changing or repairing is really easy. I could compare it to a little bit more sophisticated blog. It offers possibility to export data from other aplications like Flickr. There is also possibility to present your network as a group on Facebook, what could help you to wider your community.

I know that I am obsesed with the subject searching, but the search tool in Ning is worse than in SlideShare (viz SlideShare). You could browse in most popular networks or use really simple search tool and use the keywords. There is no sign of any classification and you even can´t choos the category that your network belongs to. There is just something like keywords of your network, but they works more like tags than anything else.

Conclusion
Interesting, how from an experiment could grow up an gigant network like Ning. This aplication is interesting idea and I think that it´s mainly dedicated to people they are looking for entertainment. I can´t imagine how should I find some serious network in the torrent of recipes and Harry Potters fans.

Resource: www.ning.com