Can I Haz a Social Network? Facebook vs. Ning

I’ve been immersing myself in Facebook and Ning, along with Paul Lamb, to better understand if one is a better match for CTF to develop a social network for community investees and partners. We haven’t settled on which one yet, but have created “beta” groups/sites in both which we are actively testing.

Both platforms are easy for non-techies to use and will meet our intent of creating a dynamic, on-line space that enables CTF to better support and connect with our grantees. I would love to see the seeds of peer-to-peer learning and sharing between grantees enabled as well.

Let me highlight some of the factors that Paul and I have been discussing and weighing:

Customization
Ning wins. Ning lets you create social networking sites—and if you graduate past the free tier, you can customize domain names and the tools that exist on your site. In this sense, Ning is a hosted application service provider. Facebook allows you to create groups that have access to many of the standard applications, but this is not in the same ballpark. Facebook also has developed an API, but you basically need to be a developer for this.

User Base
Facebook wins. Facebook is growing at an astonishing rate, especially since they opened registrations to non-students. Unscientifically, I feel like there are more and more nonprofit Facebook groups and profiles now. This is where Ning’s your site is your island works against it. A ning site is YET ANOTHER URL TO TYPE IN WITH ANOTHER LOGIN AND PASSWORD TO REMEMBER. The idea is that our grantees may already spend a portion of their day on Facebook and, and thus, our content will flow to them rather than the other way around.

Security
Tie We want to be able to approve, disapprove and moderate membership, comments, discussions, etc. Both Ning and Facebook have site/platform-wide permissions.

Findability
Unknown We want our group and our content to be found—this means that there are many ways to repurpose the content, share the data, optimize it for search engines such as Google. Ning has a better sitewide search, but (according to Paul) doesn’t allow Google to deeplink. I’m not sure how will indexed Facebook is in search engines, but Facebook will probably lead to better “my friend just joined so I should join” type of serendipitous discoveries.

In the end, this is a decision between two solid choices both of which are very good. It will be a matter of energizing the community, maintaining the resources, and encouraging conversations—you know, all the real work of communities—virtual or in-person.

Through the excellent Social Source Commons (Go Aspiration!), I found Care2’s great Social Network Calculator which allows you to calculate the total cost of “ownership” for participating in social networks. Shout out to both SSC and Care2 for this.