Ning.com

Ning is a social media website platform - it gives users the ability to create communities with social interactive features such as event planning, groups, forums (message boards), live chat and video streams. These communities engage these features based off of user-generated content as well as integrated content from other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

I choose this website instead of an application because it integrates various applications to maximize community engagement passed on the features made available by a groups creator. To give a brief history, years ago Ning was a leader in free community building websites. It was utilized by various users, with thousands of groups from various interests such as education advocacy to sports fan clubs. Eventually, the handling large groups with heavy interaction became an economically issue and Ning choose to revamp the platform strategy and now only allows users to create groups at a premium fee. The shift from free to paid social media platform hosting meant a change in the types of groups going to be created, as well as the remaining groups tone, delivery and message being shared with users. Although there is still some variation in the types of communities on Ning, most of the communities that are created come with an already built-in [or established] audience unlike the former free communities that used Ning's features to create an audience.

As a platform of new ways to engage in computer-mediated communication, Ning's core features such as multiple device and application integration, video chatting, message boards and private messaging allows it to create communities on a medium such as the Internet that has large network of users from different environment (socially and technologically speaking) coming together based off of the communicative image Ning allows groups to create.