Ning is pants. Google groups are pretty pants.
Each offer a useful set of limited features, but if you’re trying to create a dynamic community, your creativity will hit the limits of their capabilities fairly quickly.
What should a complete modern social network look like? A social network is a collection of people with something in common to bind the group together. This could be an interest, it could be their employer, etc.
But what features should the modern social network offer, and does it exist as an out-of-the-box software package or hosted solution?
Essential Features
Discussions; it should not be the job of the software to dictate whether these are email, forum, blog or rss-based. The network should enable one authoritative discussion centre and leave the users to decide how they want to read and/or participate in those threaded discussions.
Content; It should be easy to publish articles and information pages and allow almost unrestricted collaboration, (eg. pbwiki).
Self-expression; Ning has the basic version of this implemented quite nicely with its configurable profile questions and activity streams. This should go a step further and allow the group to easily express itself collectively. For example, it should be easy to output the collective twitter feeds of the group on the web (or on to mobile devices).
Digital presence; Similar to the collective twitter feed, it should be trivial for members to effortlessly import their relevant flickr photos, blog feeds, youtube videos, slide/huddle pages,
Interests; Building links to other content, (delicious-style), digg-style crowd “voting” on those links; the best items become prominent on key pages. This means the group as a whole becomes a place to visit for good resources.
Search/Reporting; depending on the social network, different searching or reporting features are essential. In a professional network, it’s likely that users will want to search on the skills of its members. On a niche social network, the reporting might be as simple as a pie chart showing the different breeds of dog the members prefer.
Money for nothing
There are a variety of services and software packages that offer some of the features described above, but I can’t help but feel none of them bring together all the features with a high degree of usability. Facebook is the nearest thing I’ve seen to the above. However, its one-size-fits-all approach means a niche group can easily lose any strong sense of identity.
Community server, Expression Engine, and Kwiqq all offer at least a subset of the features I describe above. However, their default installations are all rather feature-focused rather than community-focused.
Are you already running the perfect online community? What’s your platform of choice? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
