I’ve been thinking about Marc Pincus’ question re. Ning: “i do wonder, however, what marc’s strategy is given that he is one of the biggest believers in facebook becoming the new platform for social media innovation. anyone have any thoughts or insights?”
My response:
Could they be attempting to take an alternative route to becoming a “platform for social media innovation”?
Similar goal to Facebook, but approaching it differently… rather than providing a contained community for social media innovation on top of a platform, could they be creating a platform for social media innovation that spans an unconstrained community?
And then I saw Ethan Kaplan shared a similar thought: “I think maybe the dark-horse in the Facebook wars brewing is indeed Ning. Think: it was Platform before Platform was Platform.”
Ning definitely was a platform before their was Platform. However, Ning’s strategy of producing a platform that then spans an unconstrained community (think: the web) will take a significantly longer time to realize than Facebook’s, which is to build a platform that spans their contained community. If that’s the way it’s going, Ning may have made the right move by raising so much money… it will be a long battle for them to realize their strategy.
It’s interesting to note that in this post Umair chastises Ning’s round, calling it dumb money dumped into a sideways strategy.
And yet, in this post he questions the amount of long-run value created by Facebook:
1) The platform strategy is kind of yesterday. It fails to maximize the potential complementarity between Facebook and apps, by keeping things semi-closed. The new platform strategy, as we all know, is to get inside-out, widgetized, blah, blah, blah…
It’s hard to reconcile the two points when you consider that Ning’s strategy can realize the “new platform strategy” (imagine the Escher painting-like situation of a Ning social network-in-a-widget embedded into a Ning social network-in-a-widget…)