I won't make a Sun journalist with headlines like that, but I had to find something that reflected the honours that need to be deluged on Ning.com.  Ning is a social networking application that allows anyone to establish a social network of their own.  It gives you the tools and you find the participants. 

The thing that they have achieved according to Techcrunch is the milestone of 100,000 independent private social networks on their platform - 80,000 on the about us section, its in the blog that you will find the milestone itself.  

For me this is fantastic news.  Ning was written off 18 months ago by Michael Arrington.  Gartner gave it a kiss of death, by tipping it giving it great expectations.  But the significant thing is to see the change in the positioning of Ning over that time.  Even as little as 10 months ago, Ning looked different and felt less focused.  Today Ning presents itself as the social network platform.  Back then it was a mix of "cool" concepts that you could piece together to create social networking platforms - learn from others ideas.  It felt complicated.  Today I am sure all of the functionality is there, only it is much more clinically packaged.

This phoenix like revival of fortunes ($44million at the latest funding round) carries a lesson for all of us in the collaboration and social networking space.  Applications will be born out of simplicity, even if the functionality will become complex.  I don't know what Ning's inflections point was other than determination from the founder to get it right, but focus and clarity have to core ingredient in the early days.

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