Just heard about a new Video and Photo serving service called Ning; I created an ID for myself and began to test what I could test (not everything is running right now). I don’t have that much to say about Ning! yet, but others do have a lot to say, including GigaOM and John Battelle. According to GigaOML
"The company, if you ask CEO and cofounder Gina Bianchini, has built a web platform that allows users to clone, and modify many social services that can allow you to share bookmarks, or have your friends help you create a little recipe site. Even your own Hot or Not!"
….. most importantly, the Ning Video (and Photo) can help you pull in and organize videos from across all video services like YouTube and Google Videos. If you so desire, you can embed the videos in your blog, or MySpace page.
You can customize the look and feel of your video player. I tried it - its pretty simple actually. In other words, if I could find time to exhale, I might be able to do GigaOMtv. No that is not happening anytime soon, but the power of Ning platform makes it possible.
The other two services - Ning Photos and Ning Groups give you the ability to basically create your own photo sites, and even private social networks. I am not going to go into the details, and you can check them out yourself.
3Now for the most important part of the new Ning news - a business model. The company will charge you $7.95 a month to run your own ads on these sites, or $4.95 if you want to map your domain to their website, and you can buy extra storage and bandwidth.
In short, it allows niche sites to cheaply add community tools to their existing web presence. This could be a precursor to a fund raising effort by the company that has so far been privately funded by Marc Andreessen."
John Battelle has a further insight:
"In short, they are launching open, free, customizable versions of YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr. At once. And that’s just the start….it does not lack for ambition.
I really liked the philosophy behind this company and its platform. It has the potential to change the game that major first wave Web 2 companies (like MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube) defined. In short, it’s not about one company owning a space - video, or social networking, or photo sharing. It’s about letting anyone have these kinds of services. That’s biting off a hell of a lot, and there is much to prove, but if the planets align, I have to say, it’s an impressive play. More as soon as I can…. "
Ok, here’s the thing. Suppose some of my SEO clients, who I’m telling ought to have online video on their sites (perhaps an online gaming application) decided that…in order to have that they just used some of Ning!’s tools. See the potential. With Ning!, once it gets going late this year (with all it’s services) that might be much easier to do and very inexpensive. Sites would not need to develop these tools, just the appearance of them, Ning! takes care of the rest.
