After 10 years of custom development, I decided to re-launch my community site, Oyeme.com, using the Ning platform. Here are are some of the good things that this environment offers as well as some of the challenges I faced.
Oyeme background
I started Oyeme.com in May of 1998 (I will soon post a full description of the project here) and since then it has shifted its goal several times. It started as a Web directory for U.S. Latino sites, then shifted to being more a magazine and video portal, and finally to a social site.
In its final incarnation, the site exploded in terms of traffic, and was serving 1.2 Million Pageviews and around 65 thousand unique visits. The main attraction of the site was the ability to meet Latinos in your city, no matter where you lived. As its creator and manager, I’ve experienced great satisfaction hearing stories from people in far away corners being able to find people that speak their language. I’m also certain of several couples getting married after meeting in the site.
The need to improve the user experience
With the introduction of sites like Hi5 and lately Facebook, Oyeme was getting behind in terms of what the minimal toolset was for a social site. Users started to ask for the ability to change their profile themes, add video, widgets and music. To this point, Oyeme was custom built using PHP and was a major undertaking to try to build all those things by myself.
I decided I would move Oyeme to a white label social networking platform. After evaluating a number of different alternatives (see a comprehensive list by blogger Jeremiah Owyang) I decided to try out the Ning Platform.
The Ning platform
Ning has evertyhing Oyeme users were asking for. They could have fully customized profiles, WYSIWYG text windows, widgets, activity streams, photos and slideshows and full customization of the look and feel of the whole site.
One of the cool things about the Ning platform is the ability to editorially highlight content on the home pages of the site. So if you, as a moderator, like a photo, a member profile, a forum post, etc, you can, with one click, promote to the home page, allowing users to discover quality content easily.
Another necessity for me was internationalization, and Ning not only offers translations of major languages, but also allows you to update, modify or create your own. Although you can’t have more than one language at the same time (see Final Thoughts below), the majority of users in Oyeme do use Spanish, so I selected that as my main language, and then further customized it to my own needs.
The platform also offered advanced member and content management. You can promote regulas users to administrators, and every content item on the site can be deleted by an admin. You can also expel users that are disruptive to the community.
Ning would also come way cheaper than what I was paying for. Until today, I had a dedicated server at $75 a month, with potential scalability issues on my horizon. Ning basically offers the basic setup for free, with some premium services, which include the ability to have your own domain name, serve your own ads and erase all of Ning’s branding. The three premium services are costing me $33 a month using 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth. I can add mode storage and transfer as the need comes.
Ning uses what they call “the content store” or XNS, as their content backend. It is accessed via an API, and much like Google’s APP engine, it’s a relational DB cloud that scales on their end, allowing total freedom for the developer to just build their application as they wish, without worrying about hardware, clustering and routing.
Ning offers you the ability to completely customize their code, which is written in PHP, but from that point on you are responsible to merge your branch with their changes manually. Although I don’t foresee doing this with Oyeme right off the bat, it’s a possibility I have for the future.
I offered a Beta version of the site and informed users one month in advance about it, so that I could get early feedback of what users liked and what they didn’t. I also wasn’t going to port users or content from the existing Oyeme, so I communicated the fact that they would have to register again and also reestablish their friendships. There might have been a way to import the data, but I didn’t see an easy way to do so.
Final Thoughts
So far (after four hours of being live), the new Oyeme has 660 users (of the 30,000 registered I had in the old site), and although I can see some of the users not bothering to join again, the core creator community has not only joined, but has given me great feedback about the new site, and as many of you know, this is the most important bunch of any online community.
Some of the things I’d like Ning to offer (or that I need to build) are:
- The ability to have more than one language on your site.
- Advanced geolocalization features (i.e. see users near me, see users on a map)
- My friends (and not only global) activity streams
- Enabling javascript on pages (I tried adding a JS login for Userplane’s chat and couldn’t do so).
One of the major differentiating points of my old site was the ability to find users from your country in your city. That capability is gone for now, and I will have to build a custom section to be able to offer this. But at least I know I can potentially develop it using Ning’s API.
All in all, the freedom of not worrying about code development and scalability for my community is a great burden that has been taken off my back, and now I can concentrate on making the site better, knowing that every once in a while I’ll have a new application to incorporate for my users.
