The main problem here is with the thoughtlessness with which Facebook handles what should be its central asset - the social networks that its users belong to. Social networks are defined in the first place by the term 'friend', but being friends with someone on the site is no more than a binary decision: you either are, or you're not. There's no opportunity to do what we do in our lives outside of Facebook every day - to distinguish between different types and levels of friendship: work colleagues, old school friends, family members, neighbours, ex-lovers, casual acquaintances must all be classified simply as either 'friend' or 'non-friend'. What's the use of that?
This fundamentally ignores some of the basics of how we as humans understand the social networks we're embedded in. We don't just see everyone as our 'friends', but instead have social ties with others that are more or less strong - and for most of us, there's a pretty low upper limit on the maximum number of really close friends we have.
Facebook's enforced flattening of the complexities of social relationships into a binary yes/no choice dilutes the salience of its social network to the point of uselessness. This is further exacerbated by the limited role of groups as a means of defining and developing much more closely connected clusters of users.
Perhaps it's just poor or lazy design; perhaps the flatness of the site's social structure is somehow driven by the deeply entrenched neo-con views that some claim exist amongst Facebook's founders - a libertarian vision of sociality centred around highly independent individuals rather than around strong communities bound by consensually developed, ever-evolving social protocols?
Happily, while Facebook is an increasingly transparent attempt to hijack the hive - to capture and commercialise user activity -, more sensible alternatives are also readily available. As far as I'm concerned, a core aspect of such sites must be that they allow for the development and self-organisation of strongly connected social communities whose members retain their power over when, where, and how they interact. Many researchers have pointed to the ways in which online communities collaboratively develop protocols (rules, value systems, mechanisms) for their interaction; these protocols are always directly related to the shared object of interest in the community (whether that's software development, intellectual or recreational pursuits, or sociality itself) - but they're not bound to a specific technology or space of interaction in the way that Facebook attempts to bind participants to its site.
protocols to facilitate sometimes controversial discussion on the merits of various cultural texts while maintaining a shared sense of common purpose and a strong understanding of what it is that unites them as fans; the communities of open source developers working on specific projects have protocols to evaluate individual contributions to the project while maintaining an overall development roadmap. Wherever they are, they collaboratively shape their own spaces; they make use of whatever technologies are at hand and useful for the job. Michel Bauwens describes this as "a new form of protocollary power"
the genius of the protocols devised in peer to peer initiatives is that they avoid the creation of a collective individual with agency. Instead, it is the communion of the collective which filters value. ... Not having given anything up of their full power, the participants in fact voluntarily take up the concern not only for the whole in terms of the project, but for the social field in which its operates.
Ning can be described in short, therefore, as a kind of 'Facebook done right'. On Facebook, social capital in the network is measured mainly on a quantitative basis: the more friends you have, the more of a network hub you are. Qualitative aspects - strong or weak ties, and the context of your connection with another person in the network - hardly get a look in: all links in the network are virtually equal, and thus ultimately equally meaningless. On Ning, the balance is reversed: it's the communities you belong to, and the meaningful contributions you make to those communities, that indicate your place in the network - not the friendship scores you rack up on your profile page.
community interaction doesn't have to stop where Ning stops. (That said, Ning sites can be set to 'private', though.) Ning can be just one element - a central hub, aggregator, forum, perhaps - in a federated network of personal and collective blogs, wikis, collaborative project sites, and there's no requirement for all members of that federation to commit to it.
Frankly, in my view, Facebook's walled garden approach ultimately perverts the idea of social networking, of social interaction, of sociality itself; however popular it may be today, I fear that as its inner workings become more and more obvious, we'll find that that Facebook is giving social networking a bad name. Ning, and other sites like it, go some way towards reclaiming the idea of social networking by providing a more sensible, sustainable, and indeed social alternative. No doubt some of them have their own flaws - but overall, good luck to them!