To Compete or Not to Compete

In an article on TechCrunch here, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini was interviewed about the company and its identity. With 41 million registered users and 92 million people visiting Ning sites monthly, it finally seems to be catching some media attention. What I found interesting about the interview was her insistence that Ning was not (trying to be) a competitor to Facebook. According to her:

Here’s what I think is happening in the market. And this is not rainbows and sunshine saying this – what’s really interesting is that all of these companies [like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning] were basically founded in 2005, 2006, 2007, and what’s actually happened is that each one of them has gotten really comfortable and more narrowly focused on the thing they do better than anybody else.

Ms Bianchini says what Ning is better at doing is creating a richer and more immersive social experience because, unlike Facebook, Ning is not bound to limited features and is not locked within Facebook itself. Her view is that Facebook did a great job in getting people with similar interests together by making fan pages, but that "where the market is going and where you'll see more and more people do interesting things, is where is the hub, where are they sending people. And that is Ning." The author of the article states that "instead of [Ning] competing with Facebook (and Twitter, etc.), [Bianchini] sees Ning as the center of an ecosystem that includes all of these products."

My first impression is that the CEO of Ning is wrong that Ning is not a competitor of Facebook since my first thought after visiting Ning for the first time was that I did not want to create another profile on Ning when I already have Facebook and LinkedIn profiles that I barely have time to manage. But her idea of Ning or Ning-sites as the place where people are sent when they are more deeply interested in a subject made me think about the ability to better target people for marketing. If Ning really delivers on their promise to create a deeper more immersive social networking experience for people with higher levels of interest and passion in certain areas, they should be able to demand a lot from people wanting real estate on their webpages for targeted advertising.

Does anyone out there use Ning? If you were interested in a subject enough that you would check out a Ning page dedicated to that, would you be more likely to click on a link?