Anthony Bradley

A cnet article “Ning hits 1 million social networks” caught my attention. One million social networks is a lot of social networks even considering that anyone can go in there and start one up for free. Wow, what a success for Ning. Well, not really. The article goes further to state that about 20% are active. So in reality, they have 200,000 social networks and 800,000 shells. And now if you correct for active users the 20 million goes down to 6 million which gives Ning an average of 30 active participants per active social network.

This figure is significantly unimpressive.

Although I strongly agree with Ning co-founder Gina Bianchini’s emphasis on “thinking about people as their interests and passions” it seems that they have much work to do in making that translate into a large set of thriving social networks. Good headline though.