Davos Interviews: Ning CEO Gina Bianchini Insists Facebook Isn’t A Competitor

Up next in our series of tech interviews at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week: Gina Bianchini, the CEO of social networking service Ning. Ning has never had the press attention of Facebook and Twitter. But there are 41 million registered users on Ning, and Gina says that 92 million people a month worldwide visit Ning sites. We spoke at length in the interview about how the world sees Ning, and how Ning defines itself. Anyone can easily create a Ning social network, cobranded or white labelled. 2.5 million of them have been created so far. In some ways Ning networks are competitive to Facebook Pages (here's the TechCrunch Facebook page). Both allow for a presence inside of a social network. And when faced with a choice, most may choose Facebook simply because it has so many hundreds of millions of users to help word spread virally. Gina doesn't see it this way. She notes that Facebook pages have limited features and are locked within Facebook itself. Ning allows for deep social experiences around brands and things. Instead of the product competing with Facebook (and Twitter, etc.), she sees Ning as the center of an ecosystem that includes all of these products. A fascinating excerpt from the interview: