Monday, January 23, 2006

Another five minutes?

It looks like Michael Arrington's criticism of Ning has pushed them into addressing at least some of his points. In what appears to be a response to the criticisms levelled at the start-up they've posted a summary of what's been happening and news of some new features coming soon on their blog.

Diego Doval has now made a more measured response than his initial reply, and people are jumping to the defence of Ning. On the other hand some people are pointing out how "lost in space" Ning has become. Back when I originally grabbed a beta account I added a couple of Ning-related blogs to my feeds list. But despite that I don't remember seeing anything other than puff pieces about the site since then, at least until Michael's post. If a Web 2.0 company can't be bothered to write about itself on it's own blog, it's evidence of something, although I'm not exactly sure what...

What Ning is trying to accomplish is laudable, but bubbles are about mindshare, and they've made a poor first impression on the great and the good. It's going to be hard for them to recover from that, perhaps their competition will learn from their mistakes? You don't just have to have the right service at the right time, it has to be pushed at the right people as well, and that also has to happen at the right time.

Your start-up has five minutes to sell itself to me, don't waste it, you probably won't get another five minutes...

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