Wishlist 2012

Good job Ning on all your latest developments over the year 2011! The platform has come a long way and you should all be proud! It's the holiday season so I made my wishlist =]

On-Site Notifications: An area on the Ning Bar that updates the minute someone comments a users page, created content, or content replied to. Similiar to the way the New Beta Chat has an icon for how many messages you missed only it would be notifications related to user content.
Auto-Refresh: Auto-refresh the latest activity module and areas where comments are placed.
Enhance the Ning Bar: Add Inbox,Alerts,Friends,Settings,and Notifications to it. Its a more professional look and saves space. :)
Profile Upgrade: Make the profile tabbed and allow for additional "information blocks" to be completed after sign-up.
Group Upgrade: A tabbed design would be lovely.
Forum Upgrade: Sub-Categories and Sticky Topics.

Tags: group, ning bar, notifications, profile

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Permalink Reply by Eric Suesz on December 20, 2011 at 9:38am

Max, I think it is incredibly disingenuous of you to claim that we do not listen. We are on this forum every day, 365 days per year, answering our customers' questions and collecting their feedback. Second, we publish a public Product Roadmap, which virtually no one actually does. Everyone says they will, but few actually do. I count that as a huge leap forward for transparency.

I very, very rarely remove a post on Creators, and I only do so when it violates our community guidelines. You yourself have posted many critical things here on Creators. Again, I know of few companies that will actually go to the length we do to allow this level of critical posting by their customers. (As an aside, I do include one of your former collection of posts -- which were removed because they violated our guidelines -- in our training for new Ning Advocates as an example of extended rants what we won't allow; perhaps you remember the time when you went on an extended rant in an attempt to flood the forum and get everyone's attention?)

We haven't updated the roadmap for 2012 yet, partly because we're still planning for the full year. We don't want to promise features we won't deliver. We've accomplished nearly everything we put on the 2011 roadmap before the end of the year because we took this type of stringent attitude. I have taken a long list of requests by people here on Creators in the past year (that includes this very discussion), and those are being considered as part of that planning.

We will satisfy all of your wants? No, I'm afraid we will not. But, are we silent, oppressive, uncaring people? We are not. We're here doing our best to collect your feedback, and I hope that 2012 will be as fruitful as 2011, which IMHO was a massive year of change for the better.

Permalink Reply by John Petrowski on December 20, 2011 at 10:10am

Regardless of what I'd like to see improved, NING rocks. If you don't think they rock, try (as I have) another social network site (won't name names) but they don't match what NING has on any basic level.

Permalink Reply by Ilisapeci Yoshina on December 20, 2011 at 12:20pm

I'm behind you on this. NING rocks but NING should be mindful on who to open the platform to due to the never ending complaints on bugs and spammer.

Permalink Reply by Max Henry on December 20, 2011 at 4:23pm

Eric, don't take me wrong, I like Ning and I will continue to support (I just renewed for another year my membership).

However, in the last few months, I have watched like many other of your members and clients the BIG slowdown in term of new features and functionalities... and that got even worse after your latest acquisition...

Listening and responding on this board is one thing, executing on your members "wishes" is another and Ning has not been particularly good at that recently...

Your current roadmap is more like a "mirrormap", you list your achievements this year but don't talk about what's up and coming... it's close to x'mas time and you still have not published a clear plan for 2012, what are you waiting for? can you tell us when a real 2012 roadmap will be announced?

Again, I love your solutions but I am frustated about the increasingly slow rollout of new features and I am worried about what Ning might become next year... Look around, look at your competitors Social Engine, PHPFox, JoomSocial, they have an extemely vibrant community of developers and they are offering great plugins and modules every week. This is what Ning should be! Open up, relaunch your App store, embrace ideas from your "creators", launch third-party plugins (after proper QC of course) and make your platform grow much better...

Permalink Reply by John Petrowski on December 20, 2011 at 4:46pm

Here's a comment I'll make to put this in perspective. I ran a fantastic and successful community on NING in 2008 without most of what we have now. In fact, I didn't mess with too much - kept it pretty simple and got 1,100 dues paying members.

For my members, it was about the social experience - the experience I created for them and how I ran the joint. We tend to overestimate the importance of silly stuff. If we create a vibrant community, our members are as happy as clams.

The perspective needed is this: Yes, I'd like a few changes from NING but that has nothing to do with my community's experience. Look at FB as compared to MySpace. You could make your MySpace page 500 different colors with videos, widgets, and unicorns flying across it sprinkling fairy dust, etc...But FB came along with a blue and white design and cleaned their clock.

Can you change your FB page? No. Can it be a different color? No. Can you put 100 widgets on your page? No. Does FB chat completely suck? It's one of the most basic and terrible chat programs on Earth. Does it matter? No. Because friends can chat with either other. Period.

Can I mess with my LinkedIn page? A little - not much. I don't see them hurting because all of these sites are about connecting people and sharing information. NING does that.

NING could add every feature mentioned on this forum and we're not going to have a single extra member because of it. Nor will 95% of our current members remotely care. A lot of this is human nature as creators of seeing what we have and wanting more. Then getting more and yet wanting even more. I've seen some of NING "competitors." I find most of them cheesy. NING has a professional feel that's hard to get with their competitors.

In 2012 my plans are to concentrate on growing my site and sparking more social interaction with between my members. If NING offers more features, great.

Permalink Reply by Brian on December 20, 2011 at 7:27am

In my opinion, this is what needs to be done:

A massive and spare no expense to mobile viewing and interacting. Plus the ability for NC's to moderate, approve content and new sign ups, etc.
The ability to create multiple profiles for users
Continue to enhance membership billing to include multiple levels and include NING features such as video, photos, blogs, etc.
Open up NING platform to developers in a huge way so features can be developed faster.

Permalink Reply by Max Henry on December 20, 2011 at 4:24pm

Permalink Reply by Eric Suesz on December 20, 2011 at 4:50pm

I'm admittedly biased (as are you), but I completely disagree about the product itself. We released an unprecedented number of features in 2011. Way more growth than the two previous years combined, IMHO. And, we added a whole additional set of improvements in 2011 that were directly culled from NCs here on Creators. Those weren't even on our 2011 roadmap at the beginning of the year. So, in that sense, we even exceeded our ambitious roadmap.

I know you will disagree, but I just don't think you have a full view of the competitive landscape. I honestly don't even consider those self-hosted products in the same category. I encourage you to dig into some of these white-label options. I think you'll find that the details of installing and running those types of solutions can become very complicated very quickly. They aren't quite as simple as they might seem. But, if they work for you, I wouldn't discourage you from going that route.

I know there are some people who have been with Ning for years who are still upset that we don't offer a free product (they are drawn like moths to a flame toward this exact type of discussion). I know some of those same folks will only grudgingly admit that we've made a turn for the better. I don't think there's really any way for me to change those opinions, but I do think Ning has made some solid improvements and should continue to do so.

Permalink Reply by Jim Kinson on December 20, 2011 at 7:31pm

Eric, I appreciate all that Ning is doing to make us all a better place to go. I understand where Max is coming from. I must say, John Petrowski wrote, and I am not sure where it was but it went like this He told about FB and My Space and a few other sites, then he said "NING could add every feature mentioned on this forum and we're not going to have a single extra member because of it. Nor will 95% of our current members remotely care. A lot of this is human nature as creators of seeing what we have and wanting more. Then getting more and yet wanting even more. I've seen some of NING "competitors." I find most of them cheesy. NING has a professional feel that's hard to get with their competitors."In 2012 my plans are to concentrate on growing my site and sparking more social interaction with between my members. If NING offers more features, great."

I agree with him. As a creator myslf, I am concentrating on getting my members involved. I don't want to see one fall through the cracks, and then gone for good. I like what Ning has to offer, with the exception of the new chat, but I am in hopes they will continue to listen to our wishes, as we are the ones that buy and use it. This continuation of asking and complaining that Max does, is very frustrating to other creators and I am sure the Ning administrators. Thanks.....

Permalink Reply by Max Henry on December 20, 2011 at 4:56pm

Eric, can you tell us when a real 2012 roadmap will be announced?

do you also have plans to revive your Apps and allow third-party developers to grow the features on Ning?

I think the time has come that you need to be super clear with your plans for 2012...

Permalink Reply by Jane Lucienne on December 21, 2011 at 11:18am

I wish when using text boxes to add content that the paragraphs would look on the finished page the way they do when you're typing it in. With lots of white space between paragraphs. I shouldn't have to add breaks and paragraph marks in HTML to get the paragraphs to double-space. Please fix this!! It seems to be system-wide, e-mail too. I've been living with this for a long time hoping somebody else would complain about it and get it fixed.
The Status text box has a glitch in it. The behavior is not the same between the Main Page and the other pages. In the Main Page when you click in the box the text highlights so you can type and replace. Not all the other pages do that. This should also be fixed.

Although it looks like this text box is behaving just fine. I wonder why the text boxes on my site don't behave like this?

Thank you!

Jane