We're big fans of Marc Andreessen. He's freakishly bright; he always has an interesting take on news; and he's refreshingly honest.
That said, we don't completely buy his 1,000-word thesis about how Google really, really does not compete with Ning.
The gist of Marc's argument is this: Anything that's good for social networking is good for Ning, and if you want people to come to your site, sometimes you have to go to them.
"From a strategy standpoint, we want to enable maximum flow both into and out of Ning networks and the rest of the web. It should be as easy as possible for users to get from elsewhere on the web into a Ning network, and likewise as easy as possible to flow from a Ning network to anywhere else on the web -- and ideally, while taking their social context with them," Andreessen wrote on his blog.
(The bold emphasis is his.)
In a nutshell, Ning lets users build their own social networks. It's a simple, intuitive process. Problem is that people don't want the hassle of checking multiple sites to communicate with different friends.
Google Friend Connect, theoretically could provide something of a solution to that problem. The service, announced earlier this week, lets publishers add social features to all sorts of plain-jane sites. It also lets users search for friends across different social networks; and it will let them see what's going on with those friends on participating sites.
We understand why Andreessen adamantly denies any sort of competition between the two services -- they are, to some extent, complimentary. Still, from where we're sitting, Google and Ning's interests appear to be odds: Ning wants its network of properties to be a destination. Google is, to some extent, undermining destination sites by bringing the social network to the people on other sites that aren't traditional social networks.
Also, history has shown us that another company (whose name rhymes with Yahoo) that didn't immediately identify Google as a competitor, ended up getting plowed.
Back in 2000, Yahoo ditched Inktomi to use Google's search service. At the time, Yahoo management swore up and down that Google wasn't a competitor -- how could it be? Google had no interest in becoming a "portal" and it hadn't done anything to steal traffic from Yahoo. But slowly, Google started beefing up its content, adding new services and features, and before long, Google ate Yahoo's lunch.
It didn't happen overnight.
"[The portals] don't feel we're competing with them, and we're comfortable with that model. I use my favorite portals for sending e-mails, instant messaging, tracking stock portfolios--all these things Google isn't doing," said Google's Omid Kordestani to CNET at the time.
But lo and behold, eight years later, now Google offers email, instant messaging, stock-tracking services, and last month, it surpassed Yahoo to become the most popular web site in the U.S.
Photo: Flickr/joeywan
