How friendfeed could help move ning content.

[polymath22]

ning has a few problems and i think friendfeed may be able to provide the solution.

first, there are well over 200,000 ning sites created, but not enough members to keep many small ning sites new, fresh, relavent, and sustainable. it seems that many people are reluctant to join their first ning site, but once they join one, they are more likely to join others. So, you have a situation where ning network creators join each others ning sites and help each other out with membership numbers, content, etc., but very few non-creator members join.

i am currently a member of well over 60 ning sites. some have over 17,000 members, others have only 3 members. especially with these small ning sites, it is discouraging to know that the work you do may never be seen by anyone. this creates a catch 22 where you won't get any new members until you have content, but you won't have content until you have members.

one way i keep my profiles on these ning sites new and fresh and relavent is to have my personal friendfeed RSS out and into my profile. my friendfeed shows up on the bottom left corner of my profile here.

i do this to all of my ning profiles, so you could imagine how useful it is to me to be able to go about my business on reddit, youtube, mixx, ning, etc. and have all that information updated in 60+ different profiles. if i find something especially good, i can submit it on any of the ning sites i belong to and it will show that information in any of the other ning sites i belong to.

this kinda creates a problem. if i post a link to a text article in the forum with a small "digg like" title and description of the link, this feeds out and would create what some may consider to be a "link-jacking" because they have to click twice to get to the original content. but whatever, its not really that much different than seeing a link to a digg or mixx article that you have to double click to get to original content.

so, the way my personal friendfeed updates, it doesn't allow for a lot of "filtering". something i submit on mixx gets the same atttention as when i make a minor update on my profile on some obscure ning site. everything i do gets treated the same, and only things directly related to me get picked up.

it would be nice to be able to filter the RSS inputs and outputs, say to input activity from anyone on the network, but to output only youtube videos that come through this particular feed aggregator. it would be nice to have available to all friendfeed members the option to have any numbers of feeds, (with bells and whistles). i think calling them "vines" or "grapevines" would help people visualize the idea.

i think that as technology allows more and more people to have access to videos, a swell of illiterate people will swarm the internet, demanding information like the rest of us, but consuming it via video rather than text. a tecnological "leapfrog" if you will, kinda like how 3rd world countries skipped land-line telephones and went straight to cellular.

here are 4 ning sites that are built for 4 different local labor unions. i personally know people who belong to these unions, so naturally i want to help them by occasionally submitting something to each web site.

iam831members.ning.com uaw838members.ning.com
ufcw431members.ning.com
rwdsu110members.ning.com

chances are good that anything i submit to one web site would be equally as relavent to any of the other web sites. what if they could all feed onto one vine and populate each others sites?

right now, i can do that by submitting something to mixx, and adding it to several different communities, where the RSS out feeds a reader in each of these.

lets say i want to build a new web site for my own local labor union, but i know gathering content will be time consuming. what if i could go into some other existing local union ning sites like these, grab the RSS feed from the video section, add it the RSS feed from the video sections of the other union sites, and just like that the new site is "tapped into" a newly created grapevine of what videos other like-minded people are sharing.

im not sure why some RSS output are only links that you must follow, while other feeds allow you to watch youtube videos right on the same page, like this barack obama feed provided by news.google.com

[Digidave]

Dude. I think you are definitely on to something. The real question would be - how to actually get Ning to listen.

I love Ning. I think it has lots of potential - but I also think it's falling short.