Marc's Voice

And so we begin a discourse and discussion on Ning with the top Ningster PR person

My sequence of 3 posts on Ning got the expected response from the person I was hoping would ‘reach out’ to me. Isn’t the blogosphere efficient?

First I want to reply to someone named Thomas as he corrected me on the fact that OpsWare is not OpsWare but Opsware. Clearly a gross misjustice and rude statement - so I guess I’ll call it Opsware.

The fact that the sale was $1.6B instead of $1.5B doesn’t really matter - does it? And the defense of Opsware being a viable entity with $100M in sales sounds great until you remember how much VC money these combined companies took in - which quite frankly I don’t really care that much about - all I know is UpTime was down when I wrote the post - so Opsware can’t be THAT good.

But the main person I wanna be talking to is Brooke Hammerling - the person I directly addressed in my third post. Brooke is in charge of PR for Ning. I was pretty sure Brooke doesn’t read my blog, but I KNEW that someone would call her up and clue her in to what I had said when I publicly addressed her. And since I don’t have Brooke’s email or phone # - what better way to reach out - then through the blogosphere?

So I got a direct reply from Brooke - via email - which I’ll just paraphrase her response as “dude - get your facts straight - we DID NOT go out promoting the story - it was ‘discovered’.” “And you sound pretty jealous about all this….”

OK - coolio - I stand corrected. Clearly great reporting by VentureBeat - which was then picked up by Mr. Arrington . Not sure if Marc and Ning were trying to hide this or if Allen & Co. said “shhhh don’t let anybody know” - whatever. Now we know.

But that’s besides the point. That’s not what we’re really here talking about it - is it?

Brooke - let me ask you this in public then: “I have now read about Ning hitting 100,000 networks, 200,00 networks and now 230,000 I believe. As I stated in my third post “don’t you - as a PR person for Ning think we should be getting stories of what people DO with Ning, rather than just the raw numbers?

Afterall - it IS a social network - isn’t it? And it’s not REALLY about Marc or Ning - isn’t it about the Diabtetes network or some lonely girl, mistress or a Reggae network?

This was the REAL reason I did these series of posts. I’m not jealous - I’m actually curious. I really believe in meta-networks - the notion of 10,000’s of small, vertical niche networks - specializing in all sorts of affinities, colleges, places, topics, memes, conversations and regional, international based issues.

Niche networks in different languages, with different aesthetics, ethics, moralities and agendi.

I’m a strong supporter of these kind of vertical networks, as opposed to the large swath horizontal networks - like MySpace and Facebook. And the data, experience, success stories and raw power of harnessing these people that Ninhg is collecting - is actually pretty important not only to people like me, but also to sociologists like danah boyd and Lili Chang.

What I’d like to see are real-world usage charts which disclose - what percentage of the 230k networks have more than 5 people in them - more than 25 people in them - more than 150 people in them.

Tell us what these are being used for - perhaps broken down by category or activity level. And its OK if the network is about porn or whatever. I actually don’t mind.

Politics is a big thing this year - how many Obama networks are there many? How many whacko libertarian ones? What about religion - what religions are most represented - which ones the fewest?

What I do mind if being just told how many of them there are - as if that raw number actually means anything. It doesn’t.

And if you wanna get into business model validation - lets look at the 4M uniques you’ve reported and analyze that by time on the network - compared to say Facebook or MySpace.

So in summary - I really am not jealous - I’m excited that you folks are educating all that private equity around the world - where to go and hide their money. I’d much rather take dumb private equity money than stupid VC money. They’re much less intrusive.

And Good Yuntuf to you all. Happy Pesach!