Let the battle begin. While researching white labeled social networking solutions, I decided to do away with charts and spreadsheets and get my hands dirty.

I decided Ning.com was a good place to start. The company has a lot of buzz and promise after raising $44 million in capital funding.

As I started working I was suprised at how quickly I could get a good looking, fully functional social network. In a little less than two hours, I thought I had the foundation for something great.

Needless to say, over the next few days I sort of hit a wall in my development. I found myself staring at my web site looking for ways to enhance it. I guess I just got tired of the cookie cutter look and decided to investigate the open source code that Ning offers.

Again I was pretty happy with the content on network Ning put together for developers. I have to admit though that I felt a bit handcuffed by my lack of development skills. I’m pretty good with html, css, and photoshop, but lack more advanced skills.

In my opinion, Ning and other white labeled solutions should cater to users with my skill level. Otherwise we wouldn’t need them at all.

Here are a couple of things that I wish were easier to do:

• Adding a new tab, that lead into a blank page, where I could house whatever I wanted.
• Adding a privacy settings to the personal profile pages, so that anyone not logged into the site can not view any personal profile pages.
• Easily add modular header backgrounds.
• Improve the look and feel of the tabs, so that they are more inviting.

Other than that, my experience was good. The privacy settings really bothered me though. I hope they look into this because I’ve decided to privatize my network for a while and explore other options. In part two of this blog, I’ll write about my experience with KickApps.com.

Update: Read Part II of Ning vs. KickApps

UPDATE: Please read more of my articles on my new marketing blog.