Ok, so I’m about 2,500 social networks late on this but “392,500 social networks on Ning!” doesn’t have the same ring to it so I rounded down.

Much more importantly, we’ve got a lot of great stuff - large and small - coming down the pipe here throughout August and September. I’ll be blogging about some of it here shortly. So, while most are out enjoying summer and its requisite fresh air, we look forward to staying huddled in front of our computer screens pushing out more stuff for you to love (or hate, but we’re aiming for a strong opinion either way :-)).

As always, we appreciate you using the Ning Platform to create Your Own Social Network for Anything. We don’t take you choosing us for granted and love your gigantic expectations of what we can - and should - deliver with Your Own Social Network for Anything. Please don’t stop.

Thank you!

We just passed 370,000 social networks on the Ning Platform! Things are hopping fast and furiously over here and the great networks just keep on coming. We love it!

It’s nice to be back and on the Ning Blog following a quick honeymoon and a few other travels. Team Ning has discovered and showcased some amazing new social networks on the Ning Platform here and we couldn’t be more excited by the vastly diverse and creative ways people are using Ning today.

The big news for us is that you all are doing it in increasingly large numbers. We just passed 355,000 social networks on the Ning Platform and we’re growing at close to 2,000 new networks a day. While we sure like to see greater and greater numbers of people discovering the freedom and power to create their own social networks, the proof is really in each and every individual new and compelling social network created here.

That’s what gets us up in the morning and brings us in on the weekends: watching you create something that is unique and important to you. We love playing a small role in enabling this basic human desire and making it as simple, easy, and fun as possible.

We look forward to continuing to bring you more freedom, more options, and more features in our mission to provide simply the best social networking platform on the planet.

Thanks!

Talk about letting a thousand flowers bloom! This morning we just passed 275,000 social networks on Ning.

With the redesign we rolled out this weekend and finished last night, we’ve seen a surge in new social networks created on Ning. We love that many of these have been created by people new to social networking dipping their toes in the water of experimentation. Experimentation is good. It’s a large part of why we are here.

To our current Network Creators as well as our new ones, we want to send out a huge thanks for giving us a shot and we look forward to releasing many more shiny new things shortly.

Thanks!

We’ve got a ton ‘o great stuff coming up here in the coming weeks and we want to share with you what we’re planning to roll out between now and July.

Key Priorities

Our key priorities through May, June, July and, well, forever, remain the things that give you the best, fastest, and most flexible social network and the freedom to make it the exact right perfect thing for you.

A few of the hardest and most time consuming of these things are also the least sexy, but they are ultimately the things that matter the most. Here’s our list of VIPs (Very Important Priorities):

1. Uptime and Availability. We’re working behind-the-scenes to drive the uptime of your networks to well over 99% by June. Many of the projects we’ve been knocking out in the past few months have been to address the unacceptable levels of unplanned downtimes we’ve had over the past few months. Ironically, to stave off unplanned downtimes, we’ve needed to take Ning down this month for a few planned maintenance windows - like Saturday night’s as well as this upcoming Wednesday’s Saturday’s - but these will continue to get less and less frequent as we move forward.

2. Performance. We’re continually working to speed up the performance of your social networks on Ning. No one, especially us, likes to wait for a page to load. We’re putting in place another set of significant performance improvement that we’ll have out here at the beginning of June or earlier.

3. Ensure Your Network is as Viral as Possible. We want your network to have all the hooks necessary to make you look like a star to the people invited to your network. Giving people a reason to join and then making it extremely easy to do so is vital. Plus, people make your network dramatically more fun, so this is always a priority for us.

4. Maintain the Absolute Best, Most Flexible Social Networking Software Available at Any Price. We’re passionate about giving people the freedom to create. We’re also extremely competitive, Type-A people who want to offer the best social networking software available in the market at any price. Yeah, we even want to beat the really expensive guys. Sometimes we come up short - and you are fantastic for letting us know when we do - but we work hard to keep delivering better and better features, more and more choices, and the freedom to customize your network in (almost) any way you’d like. We have no intention of stopping in our quest to offer you each and every thing you want out of your social network on Ning.

Continue reading May Product Roadmap - What’s Next?…

We recently came across Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Ning article. The series focuses on a technology — in this case, having a social network on Ning. It gives an overview of the product, as well as where it is going and why it matters to world of teaching, learning and technology from an educational standpoint. From Educause:

Ning provides an avenue for instructors to take advantage of social networks in a neutral setting, offering functionality and an experience that are familiar and comfortable to students. By creating social networks around academic topics, or even about specific projects for a course, an instructor can facilitate a strong sense of community among the students, encouraging personal interactions that can lead to the creation of new knowledge and collective intelligence.

We’re thrilled to see education-focused networks having positive effects in the educational community, and we’re thrilled that people are using the Ning platform in the education sector. And Educause doesn’t appear to the only educators espousing the benefits of creating social networks. Mark Greenfield, one of the guys behind the recently blogged University Web Developers, talks about the benefits of his network:

For me, the site has been very beneficial. I have received excellent feedback on a number of questions and ideas. More importantly, I’ve met many new people involved with higher ed web development and these relationships will prove valuable down the road.

Social networking is a part of what the Web has always been about: the facilitation of conversations on topics that people are passionate about. And we’re delighted to offer a way to make that conversation a little bit easier in the educational community.

We just passed 220,000 social networks on the Ning Platform. Wahoo!

We also moved the Ning Blog to Word Press. In addition to enabling a handy little plug-in for fully integrating the Ning ID registration system with Word Press authentication (as Ernie mentioned here), Word Press is just fun to use. I’m a huge fan.

Unsurprisingly, I’m also a huge fan of the 220,000 social networks on Ning. Our Advocacy team has done a great job highlighting a few of the amazing networks Network Creators have whipped up on the platform recently. What’s exciting is that they are a fraction of the full picture.

They don’t capture all the big and small ways folks are using private social networks for families, weddings, teams, friends organizing a trip, youth groups, and every other conceivable way a posse may want to organize.

When we first started Ning, I thought we’d need to be at millions of social networks before the full potential of all of this was truly felt. I was wrong.

Looking around at the sheer range and diversity of the networks on Ning today, it’s clear to me that when we get to millions of social networks it will simply blow my mind.

I can’t wait.

Ning and your social networks running on it will be unavailable on Sunday March 30 from 1am until 2 am Pacific Standard Time. We’re making a few back-end updates that will make your networks a bit more speedy.

As always, we’ll keep you updated on progress at the Ning Status Blog.

Thanks and enjoy your morning!

Have I got an opportunity for you…

The Ning Platform is growing like a weed and we’re expanding our team to create a whole new flurry of awesome things for you and your networks. We’re looking for people to define new features, build them, test them, and make sure they can continue to scale like wildfire.

Here’s a little more info on Ning the Company:

• As we mentioned last week, we just passed 200,000 social networks on the platform and we’re growing at over 1,000 social networks per day. This continues to translate into exponential growth in page views and unique users. Put simply, people like what we’re offering and that popularity continues to accelerate.
• We’re based in Downtown Palo Alto, CA a hop, skip and a jump away from Cal Train. We’re primarily looking for people to be in our worldwide headquarters here in beautiful Northern California, but for certain positions, we’re open to exploring something remote.
• We’re well-funded and have a clear business model. In other words, we’re not going anywhere.
• You’d be joining a team of incredibly talented people (present author excluded). If you’re right for Ning and Ning is right for you, we can promise an incredible professional and personal experience.

As a first step, take a whirl through our Ning Jobs section and see if anything catches your eye. If it does, drop us a note. Even better, drop us a note with a resume. If there’s a good fit, Team Recruiting at Ning may just become your new best friend.

Have a great weekend!

So, what’s Ning’s business model?

Unsurprisingly, we here at Ning HQ get this question quite a bit. Equally unsurprisingly, we’re happy to answer it.

Revenue

Today, we generate revenue from two sources:

1. Contextual Advertising. It’s free to create your own social network on Ning. On free networks, we reserve the right to run ads. Currently these ads are powered by Google AdSense.
2. Premium Services. Network Creators can buy additional features to add to your social network on Ning. These currently include the right to run your own advertising, the option to use your own domain name, the option to remove the “Create Your Own Network” promotional links, and additional storage and bandwidth.

Revenue from contextual advertising and premium services today is growing at over 25% monthly. While we don’t have a ton of revenue nor do we expect to be breaking revenue world records soon, 25% monthly revenue growth is still cheer-worthy. Perhaps a very small cheer, but a cheer nonetheless.

More importantly, we believe that advertising and premium services are solid sources of revenue that become even more interesting as greater numbers of people create and use social networks on the Ning Platform.

As a result, we’re maniacally focused on first making the Ning Platform the best and biggest platform for creating your own social network for anything. This is our number one priority. Once we’re well on our way to widespread adoption, we’ll shift gears to focus more on taking our contextual advertising and premium service revenues to new levels.

Expenses

Ah, expenses. It’s the peanut butter to revenue’s chocolate. The primary expenses we have running the Ning Platform are people and infrastructure. If you are familiar with Internet services, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

We manage our expenses here at Ning by investing heavily in our team who, in turn, work furiously to reduce what we need to spend on infrastructure. This has enabled us to hold the majority of our capital in reserve while we build out the Ning Platform with more features and faster performance at rapidly growing levels of scale.

The (obvious) end goal is for us to exclusively support the Ning Platform with revenues generated by it. We think this is a little ways out, but a few investors decided we were a good bet to take. We’re very much enjoying the process of proving them right.

So, there you have it. We’re happy you asked.