Luke Gedeon has a wonderful review up comparing his experiences with CrowdVine and Ning. It’s actually a really thorough and fair point by point comparison and we don’t come out on top in every regard. But it ends with this very direct prediction:

my prediction is that Ning is going to get its head handed to it on a platter.

Although I’m glad we fared so well in the head to head comparison, I find that we rarely compete with Ning for customers and that, for the most part, a customer can make the right choice between the two of us without hurting either of our feelings. I’ve got some other criteria and explanation which I think are useful for making the right choice (and important for anyone who wants to understand where social network software is going).

CrowdVine and Ning have fundamentally different company structures and that leads to different approaches which I think, now and for the future, means that we will live in different segments of the same market. Also, I have tremendous respect for the team Ning has put together, starting with their founders Marc and Gina and including the engineers I’ve met (Brian McCallister in particular), so I don’t expect that anyone is going to hand them their head on a platter and I’m very sure that if anyone tries, CrowdVine won’t be the platter, the hand, or the instrument of displacement.

Ning was founded as a traditional Silicon Valley startup. It’s backed by venture investors who are by definition driving for massive growth (and they’re succeeding). Ning has massive amounts of funding (over $100M) and is by far the most successful of the venture backed social network software providers.

CrowdVine was founded as a traditional business. Our goal is to build a company that is sustained from the beginning by our revenue and that keeps building great software every year until we become too old and too tired to raise our pickaxes. We’re 100% privately owned and we’re profitable.

That gives us an independence that no venture backed startup can have, and I think that’s essential to the promise we’re making to niche communities. We’re promising them their own form of independence: a community that’s free and separate from the mass market social networks they had to live in before. I think that promise is strengthened if we as providers don’t also have a massive financial obligation (we have only a small obligation, which we’ve met, to pay the rent).

Because of that fundamental difference in company organization I find that CrowdVine and Ning have and will continue to have fundamentally different qualities. Briefly, those qualities in CrowdVine are that we make a direct connection between your time spent on our network and you achieving a goal, that we can and do make powerful niche customizations, and that you can get very high level support.

First, on the topic of connecting your time as a user to achieving a goal. Our customers are network creators who come with existing business goals. If we solve those goals we justify our pay. We have no incentives to keep you on the site, but lots of incentives to help you achieve your goals.

As a comparison, the first time I saw Gina (Ning’s CEO speak), she described Ning’s design philosophy as “if you’re hosting a party you don’t want to run out of activities.” They’re building very feature rich software so that their networks have lots of activities and so that they are good places to hang out. A lot of older people are confused by the popularity of social networks like MySpace and Facebook, but the truth is that these types of social networks are an upgraded form of leisure. People who knock social networks as not comparable to real life socializing are missing a crucial fact: social networks don’t replace face-to-face, they replace TV. Measured by usage this is probably the biggest segment of the market and so is a great opportunity for a venture backed startup like Ning. Ning is an eyeballs business. They need you to hang around (and if hanging around is a replacement for TV, then that’s a very good thing).

CrowdVine is a goal oriented business not an eyeballs business. Our design philosophy is to connect people and then get out of their way. That comes out in the features.

All our email notifications include everything you need to make a response through email: the full text of the message or comment, and the email address of the person on the other end. No need to return to CrowdVine.

Luke identifies OpenID as one of CrowdVine’s differentiators, but that’s just part of a larger example to connect and integrate with what people are doing outside of our networks. We also pull in your Flickr, Twitter, and blog feeds directly into your profile. We’d rather be the glue for your content than the repository.

Advertising is yet another way this comes out. Luke points out both that we have minimal advertising on our free options and that we could do a lot to optimize our ad revenue. However, we’re not an ad-supported company (less than 1% of revenue), so you’re not going to see any of our networks suddenly plastered with ads.

Second, on the topic of niches. We’re not always the right choice, but when we are, we’re very right.

The market for simple focused social networks is smaller than the market for leisure social networks. Partially this is true because so many of the best customers are businesses and they tend to either adopt later than consumers or have customized needs.

But if your goal is to connect with people, the fewer features the better. I learned this first hand on the team that launched Twitter. Every pundit we heard from compared us to earlier companies that had “more compelling features.” What none of these pundits seemed to get is that the only compelling feature for Twitter was the people. Any other feature was a barrier. If you have such a use case, then CrowdVine is the social network platform for you.

Plus there’s one specific niche where we do have a customized version, conferences. Our CrowdVine for Conferences product has features you can’t find in any social networking platform and that wouldn’t make sense for any use case beside conferences.

These “niches” are great for us because we can show real value to our customers but make a lot less sense for Ning because on the one hand the market for simple is smaller and on the other hand the individual markets for verticals like conferences are simply too small for that much venture backing.

Third, support. Put simply, you can get the founder of CrowdVine on the phone. I’m not out talking to the investors, or managing a huge team of people, I’m talking to our customers every day. Again, I think that’s part of being a business that depends on the success of our network creators. Plus, as a company that’s enthusiastic about conferences as a customized niche, you get specialized feedback and experience to go along with the specialized software.

I think I’ve said this before, and it continues to be true: our blogging slows down when we’re going through a growth spurt. In this case we had a big one. In May we doubled our number of conference customers and July and August have been spent growing to accommodate them. You may notice some new faces around (Chris, Michelle, and Jenn–I’ll introduce them when they’re ready). You may also notice some important new features (again, fuel for a future blog post).

However before summer ends, I want to take a moment to say welcome to CrowdVine, in some cases welcome back, and in every case thank you very much!

SAS — Many people don’t know this, but SAS is the largest privately owned software company in the world. They’re a definite model for people like us who think about building a long term business rather than something to hype, flip, and abandon (if this sounds like common sense you don’t work in silicon valley).

Business of Software - This is put on by Joel Spolsky and Neil Davidson, two huge stars in the software business. Check out the speaker list! This is a conference I should be attending and that I aspire to speak at. They’re also beta customers for one of our soon-to-release new self-service packages.

Youth Specialties - We like any conference that proves that you don’t need to be a techie to want to meet people — that’s a universal goal. YS is a premier support organization for Christian youth workers and the organizer of massive conventions. We built a custom video submission contest for them and if it goes well we’ll offer it to other people.

Pearson’s Voices That Matter - Pearson is a premier book publisher and that means they are connected to enough authors to run conferences on almost any subject. I love that when you browse one of their Speaker Pages they highlight each speaker’s book. You can’t beat that for proving subject authority.

Adaptive Path - We just finished conference #5 for them making them our most loyal customer. A lot of our product thinking is around ways that we can reward customers like AP.

Web 2.0 Expo - We just launched our third and are getting ready to do our fourth Expo network. Besides having a long history with them (Jay and I used to work for O’Reilly and I organized a section of their SF expo) I like having them in the mix because they push us to be on the cutting edge. The challenge always is how can we be modern enough for the Web 2.0 audience but simple enough for doctors, professors, and youth workers.

Search Marketing Expo - SMX was one of our first conferences to understand that networking is part of the value that attendees are paying for. We’re welcoming them back for their third conference, SMX East.

Twiistup - When we talk about the problem CrowdVine solves we talk about what happens when you walk into a crowd, spin around, and realize you don’t know anyone. Twiistup is the ultimate example of that dynamic, a crowded party celebrating Los Angeles startups. With CrowdVine, attendees show up already recognizing faces and having people they want to talk to. Plus this was another chance to work with my favorite designer, Elliot Jay Stocks.

IxDA - I don’t want to put too much pressure on them, but based on their first conference with us I tell all of our clients that you can’t underestimate the value of community management. David Malouf, from their conference committee, is still the best, most active, and most enthusiastic community manager we’ve worked with. That plus he’s an excellent interaction designer. We’re rooting for a repeat performance.

Association of Learning Technology - We’re getting a lot of interest from people in higher education. It’s an interesting field, how much of learning is from the materials and how much of it is from people? In my experience, 90% of my career development came from being around smart people. So we’re excited to work with any educational groups that want to experiment with social networking.

Communitech - They’re the Waterloo Region Technology Association and within five minutes of talking to them I was convinced Waterloo is a hotbed of startup activity. They’re running a week long series of events spread out all over town and they’re going to be giving our calendar/agenda-builder feature a workout.

There’s also a bunch of events that are using our self-service tools, BioSysBio (science), Medicine 2.0 (health), Vanderbilt Class of ‘64 Reunion (old folkslife long friends), IET Power Academy (engineering students), and National Society of Collegiate Scholars (more students).

One thing I like about them is how they prove that you don’t need to be an Internet native to want a tool to help you meet other attendees. We’re very thankful to our friends at O’Reilly Media who gave us an amazing opportunity to get into this business by letting us try our software on their conferences. That got us into a world of web conferences. But through the faith of a few more friends we’ve broken out into any field where attendees have a reason to meet.

Thank you all. Jay and I enormously thankful for the opportunity to work with you and proud of the ways you’ve used our software. Thank you.

Wow! Today is Jay Laney’s one year anniversary at CrowdVine. I was rereading the blog post I wrote, Introducing Jay, and noticed that it wasn’t written until November. We had such a backlog of work that it took three months before Jay could get even set up an official blog.

It’s been an amazing year, and a lot of it is because of the work Jay’s been doing. He’s been behind the customizations for a number of our best customers. He did our Facebook integration. We’ve seen a massive improvement in performance, many of our pages moved from an F to a B+ in the YSlow grading system. He did our private messaging system, our new microformats spider for calendar integrations, our improved feed spider (much faster and reliable) and much more. Basically he does the hard work while I talk on the phone.

Some stats, since Jay started we’ve gotten 91% of our users, 83% of our networks, 94% of our revenue, and 100% of our New York Times mentions. So clearly, he panned out!

The result is that CrowdVine has been able to go through two major milestones. First we figured out an important new business model, social networks for conferences and were able to build a product that can reliably serve them. Then we were able to build a business that wasn’t just break even, it was profitable enough to expand.

The day before hiring Jay, TechCrunch had described us as a one-man Ning. His hire meant changing the company description. Well, I just saw Jay describe himself to a customer as the other half of CrowdVine.

Unfortunately (but very much thanks to him), Jay is going to need to change his description. We’re expanding. We have a team of designers on contract that let us customize our networks so that they match your existing design and branding. We’ve brought in help for a site redesign. And we have a good friend helping us with the services side of our business.

I want to give our friend a proper introduction when he’s ready, but the summary is that we’re definitely much more than a two-man Ning. We’re a three-plus-friends-amazing-social-networks business.

Thank you Jay!

Xavier Vespa, over at the HyveUp blog, mashed up an interview I did with him last year with video of our social network creation process. He called it Dead Simple Social Network Creation.

We love to hear that! With social software we’ve found that the stronger the desire to connect the simpler your software has to be. The people need to be the center of attention, not us. However, writing simple software is a bit like writing a short essay. You need to work very hard to be succinct and it normally takes many drafts. Thank you Xavier for letting us know we’re on the right track.

And for everyone else, here’s 90 seconds where you can see for yourself: