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.

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