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 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.

We want to take a moment tonight to thank the Network Creators on the Ning Platform. If you are reading this blog post on a Friday night, this likely means you.

Not only are you creating truly amazing social networks across a mind blowing range of topics and interests, you are also making the Ning Platform better and better at an amazing rate.

Since the redesign of networks last night, your honest, immediate, and constructive feedback has enabled us to address your biggest concerns in a follow up release late this afternoon.

We will continue to listen, learn, and change as we move forward together. And, as you are using your networks over the next hours, days, and weeks, keep the great specifics coming. We’re happy to listen and adjust. If we can’t adjust, we’ll at least let you know the thinking behind our decisions. You may not agree with our rationale, but at least we’ll have the conversation.

In a market where services like ours can’t stand still, your feedback combined with your patience and flexibility has been incredible. It is very much appreciated. Who knows, perhaps this redesign might even start to grow on those of you who are still a bit unsure of all these changes.

Have a great weekend!

On Saturday night, we passed 200,000 social networks on the Ning Platform! We’re now seeing 0.5% daily social network growth, or over 1,000 networks per day:

For those of you new to Ning, we focus on the number of social networks as the primary public metric we share. Why? Because it is the leading indicator of how fast people around the world are adopting the Ning Platform.

As social networks on Ning increase, so do users, unique visitors, and, most of all, page views. In fact, the daily growth of users (at over 1.0% per day) and page views (at over 1.5% per day) far outpace the daily growth of networks (at 0.5% per day).

Over 70% of the 200,000 social networks on Ning have been actively used in the past 30 days and less than 1% of our networks — or roughly 2,000 — are in our Red Light District. This continues to follow the power law distribution curve of usage that we’ve talked about in the past.

We’re thrilled with not only the rate of adoption of Your Own Social Network for Anything but the sheer creativity and range of what people are doing with their own social networks each and every day. While 3rd party sampling services like comScore or Compete show a fraction of our progress (primarily because the most popular networks on Ning are domain mapped), the view from inside makes every day — even the bad ones — feel like a holiday.

Thank you for making this such a fun and amazing ride. It would be no fun without you.

Ah, spring is in the air as we celebrate the 195,000th social network on Ning this morning.

Wahoo!!!

Performance and stability is our number one priority. In this context, you can probably understand just how un-awesome we rate this week. It was atypical and we are committed to ensuring that it stays that way.

As a free service, we love that you hold us to the same uptime standards offered by an expensive service provider. While we don’t offer Service Level Agreements, we are committed to providing you the absolute best, highly scalable platform for creating your own social network for anything.

To put the atypicalness of this week in context, here’s our uptime statistics for the past two months compared to the first week in March:

In January, we had 99.72% uptime. In February, it was 99.41%. And for the first week of March - also known as this week - our uptime as a percentage of the first 7 days is 95.51%.

The issues this week were primarily (but not exclusively) a result of the distributed caching issue that we talked about on Monday. This issue has been resolved and is now closed.

Separately, today we had a six minute downtime which was preceded by 20 minutes of slowness and errors on the social networks across the Ning Platform. We quickly identified and resolved the issue, which was separate and distinct from the distributed caching issue earlier this week. We are currently working on a patch to ensure today’s issue doesn’t happen again.

To be clear, none of these events have been a result of challenges scaling individual networks or the platform as a whole. The Ning Platform has demonstrated nothing but grace under pressure while quadrupling traffic in the last two months. It continues to hum along happily today despite over 1.5% daily compounding page view growth.

We take this week’s unplanned downtimes extremely seriously. Our goal at this point is to eliminate any additional unplanned downtime this month while limiting the planned maintenance windows for new releases to critical issues that need to be addressed. The proof of our work will be in the pudding, namely our continued goal of well above 99% uptime.

So, while we continue to drive greater performance and stability, expand the viral features in your networks, and add more new features to make your networks increasingly spectacular, keep holding us to your highest standards. It’s a fraction of what we ask of ourselves.

On February 27, 2007, we launched Your Own Social Network for Anything. I can’t believe it’s been a year already. And what a year it’s been.

We just passed 185,000 social networks on the Ning Platform and continue to grow page views at an incredibly fast clip. In fact, our daily page views have quadrupled in the past six weeks. That alone has been amazing to watch, but it’s not our favorite part of this whole whirlwind.

Everything we do is focused on giving you the freedom to come to Ning and create the exact right perfect social network for you (within, as we’ve learned to add, legal and commercial boundaries). It’s why we started Ning in the first place and why we’re even more excited today about the possibilities of the Ning Platform than we were at the very beginning.

While small celebrations like today are important, the best part of creating software - especially software that gives people the freedom to create - is the fact that the opportunities to make it even better never go away. There are always new ways for us to define awesome. More features. More flexibility. A broader set of choices. And even greater diversity in what anyone can do with Your Own Social Network for Anything.

We’re incredibly excited about the next few releases and the new types of networks and network behavior these new options hopefully enable. We truly believe the possibilities with Your Own Social Network on Ning are endless and it’s fun to continue pushing the boundaries beyond our wildest expectations.

In putting this post together, it was interesting to go back and look at a few of the posts we wrote exactly a year ago. The 8 Steps to Creating a Great Social Network remain, from our experience, what make social networks successful - at least as far as we’ve seen over the course of the 185,000 social networks launched on Ning so far. And the lessons we’ve learned getting here still resonate for me with yet another year of perspective.

We hope you enjoy Your Own Social Network for Anything on Ning. That’s certainly the goal. We’re committed to relentlessly improving your social network by offering more flexibility, more choices, and better and better features as we enter our second year together. We, for one, are very much looking forward to the ride.

Another week, another milestone. Just the way we like it. This week we just passed 185,000 networks, growing at an average of 0.44% per day. Of these networks, 71.5% have been active in the past 30 days. Not bad, not bad at all…

We just passed 170,000 social networks on Ning! And of these 170,000 social networks, a whopping 71.5% were active in January. No wonder page views across Ning shot up so dramatically. This is DEFINITELY getting fun!