I don’t want to be a hater, but my frustration with Ning grows day by day.
What Ning does
Ning is a site designed to make it easy for you to create an online gathering place for your group. So, for example, I’m a member of a Ning group for Digital Nashville–Web and tech professionals here in town, one for my high school, and one for contributors to a moms’ website where I write.
Each of these is a separate community. I can’t flip from one to the other. Though they are built on the same platform, they function independently.
Except for one thing.
User error
I once made the mistake of starting a Ning site. I was just testing some features, comparing Ning to some other community solutions. And so, Ning knows that I am a site creator.
At some later time, I stupidly changed one of my Ning community’s email addresses to be the same one I’d used to test my own Ning community.
Now I’d like to change that email address again. But I can’t, unless I want to change it on my test community. Because now I’m a Ning creator, and I have to go back to my personal community to change contact info.
At first, I thought I was being unreasonable. After all, I’m happy with my one email on Facebook, and my minimalist contact info on Twitter. But then I realized — Ning is making me use the same identity everywhere. It’s like having to use the same email on Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and you get the picture. My relationships are professional in some Ning communities, and personal in others. I’d like my emails to reflect that.
Now, this is undoubtedly not a common problem. Just like other social networking sites, the vast majority of Ning users aren’t creators. But two thoughts here:
- Ning does actually promote itself as a site where anyone can create a community.
- If you anger your power users, you lose them as soon as there’s a better solution.
I’m not the only one out there with similar issues. Ning, why aren’t you listening?
Hi Laura,
I came upon your post on a search for Ning. I am the Director of Support at Ning and wanted to apologize for you running into this recent bug. We are now back to your being able to update your email address at any network you belong to.
To address your other concern, though one email is recommended for your account, you can create multiple accounts with multiple email addresses if you’d like (and it sounds like you have).
A great feature to enhance the single email sign in is that you can have a different profile name and profile photo at every network you belong to, if you choose. This means you only need to remember one password, but can use a more professional profile on your professional networks.
I hope this helps! If you have any questions or would like to provide further feedback, you can reach me at the Ning Help Center. You can add attn:LauraG if you’d like.
Thanks!
Laura