NING 2012 Recap: Wishing in 2013!

[Jordon McGee (Jords)]

The end of 2012 is closing in fast and it’s been quite the year at NING. Just look at this list of what has been accomplished:

• Email & IP Banning at Sign-up
• Privacy Policy Feature
• Ning Mobile
• Additional Invite Services: Facebook, Linkedin, and Windows Live
• Profile Question Limit Raised
• Removal of Standard Broadcast Message Header
• New Sign-Up Options
• Detail Pages For Status Updates
• Member Categories & Badges
• Moderate Forum
• Activity Feed UI Clean-Up
• RSS Feeds in Network Activity Feed
• Twitter Search in Social Feeds & New Activity Indicator
• Chat Product Finalization and Updates.
• Improved Member Management Interface
• Top News added to Latest Activity Feed

And big decisions:

• NC’s For Hire
• Changes to the NING Mini Plan
• Creators Digest is now Every Other Week
• Ning Creators Gets a MakeOver
• Updated Ning logo in network footer
• Brand New Help Center
• EU Cookie Directive
• Removal of Networks that Never Purchased a NING Plan
• NING TOS Changes

Wow, that’s quite a bit of success for this year! Good job NING!

Well the Roadmap still has some items on it and whether or not they will be finished before the year-end we are unaware, but that can’t stop us from wishing away for 2013! What would you love to see developed on NING in 2013 in addition to what’s on the current Roadmap?

My Dreams:

• On-Site Notifications – Similar concept to Facebook
• Profile Page update – Make it look more classy, sleek, and new layout options.
• Friends only activity feed
• Updated Photo and Video player so they can be accessed via mobile

Just a few of my big dreams! J

[Eric Suesz]

I know that voting on requests sounds really attractive, but it's not something we plan on doing. We actually do have a public Product Roadmap. I would submit to you these things: 

• No one really publishes a true public product roadmap like we do. Everyone says they will or want to or plan to; no one actually does. But we do in the spirit of transparency to our customers.
• Services like UserVoice work great for small startups who have a small community of potential customers. They don't scale when you have tens of thousands of actual customers. 
• I'm a huge fan of GitHub, but it is probably a better place for open-source developers than it might be for our more closed system. It might work for us if we had a more robust API. 
• We encourage our customers to request features directly to our support team. They will add your voice to the requests in our tracking system. This isn't a publicly accessible record of your vote, but it functions as a "vote" in our system. 
• We've done surveys in the past and should probably do more of them in the future. 
• Because we have long encouraged our customers to be vocal, we are awash in requests for functionality (we always have been). We'll never implement all of these, but I hope we can get to the most important ones over time.

[Atheist Universe]

No one really publishes a true public product roadmap like we do.

Some software companies do.
And at 500$/year you begin to qualify as such =)

[Alex]

This is a great example:  https://github.com/dotCMS/dotCMS/issues?milestone=11&state=open   You can really see what is going on and what to really expect on the next release.  Also, you can submit ideas and see if they get processed or not.  Furthermore, you can even just block access to the private code.

Perhaps, I am too technical.  But it would be nice to have the deadlines so we know what to expect and plan accordingly with our networks.  I know that a simple item may take months or may take minutes to fix so it is hard to tell with your roadmap.

Thank you for your time!

[Eric Suesz]

Totally hear what you're saying, but again I think this is a matter of scale. This GitHub repository made by a solo developer has 10 bugs and about 150 reports. Multiply those numbers by thousands and you will have a lot more data to wrangle and display (as we do). 

We have a bug-tracking system that does similar things, but it's not designed to be public to everyone. I know that our path in the past three years of as-much-transparency-as-possible has led to even greater expectations of more and more transparency, but we are more transparent than nearly any company I can think of (beyond a few small startups or solo developers with less than a few hundred customers). 

I guess my point is that we have tried to go as far in the directions that you are pointing to, but as startups like ourselves grow into adult companies it can be hard to keep up that level of meta-information about the product. We're flooded with feedback from customers and data coming from our product. We just don't have the resources to turn that feedback into an ever-updated public repository that can serve as a full window into everything that is being developed. 

(Plus, we occasionally need to be quiet when we have big things in the works.)

[Eric Suesz]

I'd love to see a few, Atheist, so point them my way. 

I've looked. Some software companies list things they want to do or hope to do in a general way. Some publish blog posts saying we want to move in this kind of direction in the coming months, but I can't seem to find a company that isn't a small shop working on a brand-new web app that does an actual roadmap — and includes the level of detail that we do. No one seems to list the actual things they are working on and plan to deliver a year in advance like we have done in the past few years. I've only found two companies that have done this, and they are both small services that are still getting started.

All that said, maybe a roadmap isn't the right approach for us anymore. I'll pass along the suggestions people share to our product team and executives and everyone else, but I don't think voting on features is a path that any large business hands over entirely to their customers. But I do agree that it sounds attractive from the customer's point of view. And, we could certainly do this type of thing better — even without voting. 

[Atheist Universe]

Don't get me wrong Eric, I'm very happy with Ning's level of detail in their projections and with the good communication we enjoy with Ning on NC.

But I've been on the creative end of roadmaps as a marketing executive and product manager for large software companies and we did produce quite elaborate plans for our customers, as each one of them represented a whole production studio with hundreds of end-users.

Same here IMO. The real customers are our members, NCs are gears in the machine and as such should be included even more closely than they are in the design of the product.

[ronnie]

I would like to have an user friendly option for my members to show their twitter and FB updates on their Ning page

[Jordon McGee (Jords)]

That would be cool!

[Joseph Gambit]

Ning is almost perfect for us right now, but there is still one huge feature missing. Multiple chat rooms. My network is intrinsically limited by the fact that after a certain number of people log on, the chat becomes unreadable. If you fixed that, even with a paid upgrade solution, it would be immensely beneficial.

[Joan]

Hi Joseph

Does Comet Chat not have this feature?