Virtual Communities - The Psychology and the Technology - Part 1 of Many

2009-10-11

Over the next few weeks, I'll be conducting a study into the psychology and technology behind Virtual Communities (VC.)

So what is a VC? Well, A virtual community uses Internet technology to share information, ideas and resources among a group of like-minded participants located anywhere in the world.* We all knew that but just to clear things up.....

Anyway, this week (for the purposes of my university group discussion) I did a short review of the not so "main stream" Ning.com. Here's the review:

General

Ning was founded and is privately owned by partnership Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen (2004.) It takes a different spin to most social networks with its USP allowing users to create their own community. This I found to be strange as you essentially have two different types of user account. One as the admin of your own VC and another as a member of another VC..... a little pointless but its the way it works.

UI Very simple in design (perhaps in some cases too simple.) Most cases only 1 colour is used on a white background.

Features

Everything you'd expect from a VC really. Puclic messages, private messages, pictures, videos, live chat (ning offers both public and personal live chat.)

The Nitty Gritty The site does degrade gracefully. The UI is not at all affected by this, however, we are given a div that spreads the width of the page telling us we need to enable JS. Any asynchronous requests are replaced with a more old fashioned style of browsing. However, the important thing is that the site remains functional.

The whole site is CSS controlled (obviously) and judging by some of the variables passed through the URLs PHP (although there is no clear indication of this.)

My Verdict

Its ok. But thats as far as I'd go. It seems to be too much of a Facebook copy for me. Its only real USP is that you can create your own community. But it aint a great USP. It also lacks some of the killer client side features (which to the average user is subconsciencely ignored) but of course as we all know as web developers, we are living in an age that that the client/user is the most demanding element we'll ever face, and while we have the ability to create richer online applications to meet the demands of these clients/users, Ning simply hasn't taken the opportunity. Any questions on this post feel free to discuss or contact me on info@mikedhart.co.uk

References

* crucible multimedia ltd (2008) Using the Internet as a virtual community [online] http://www.telecomsadvice.org.uk/infosheets/virtual_communities.htm