Ning is a social networking site that I've been using since February. It allows you to create your own social network, and I have made one called Darkblade Media, which is where I post all of my movie reviews and other things like the occasional podcast or video.
Ning has recently added their gift shop, a feature that has been present on Facebook and Myspace for quite some time now. I got excited for this, as while I'm not a fan of these virtual gifts, I am happy that this is the first free way to earn revenue off of your social networking site.
Unfortunately, the one flaw that all of these social networking sites with virtual gifts have, is the fact that you can only give people photos or animations. When are one of them going to decide that this could be put to much better use for things like Flash games, and video?
Anyway, this would be something to really get excited about, if it weren't for the fact that the rules in place here aren't good. For one thing, as the social network owner, you can only upload photos (as I said before), and for another, those photo files cannot be bigger than 10KBs. I had plans to make a Darkblade Media wallpaper available as I have one on my own computer, but the file was too big, and there's no way to compress it without making it smaller, or it's losing some quality.
Also, while Ning gives all members 100 points free (network owners receive 375), the gifts that aren't free cost 75 points each, so you could only get one! And how do you get more points? By paying for them.
Now I don't know how it works on other sites, but $2 for 100 points, which will get you only one gift, seems like a rip off to me. I mean, why not just look up a similar image on Google, and post it on that person's comment wall??? It would save you two bucks!!!
Once again; cool concept with the revenue and gifts, but not so great execution.
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