What is Ning?

If you’ve heard the buzz about 3 Degrees-Connected™ women’s network, you’ve probably heard us say “with a paid memebership” you receive access to a members only ‘ning’ network. This network will allow you to create stronger bonds with women in our community through interactive dialogue, creation of a women-owned, women-operated business directory, a page to describe yourself and what is important to you, and a place to share your business goals and objectives. Maybe you’ve picked up one of our networking brochures and wondered what is a ‘ning’ network and how can this really help me?


“Ning” is a social networking site that was launched in 2004 by two co-inventors Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreesen, and a group of angel investors. In 2007 they raised $44 million in venture capital and in 2008 they announced raising an additional $60 million in capital by undisclosed investors. The name “ning” was selected because of its simplicity, it is not an acronym for anything; but after the name was selected, the founders later discovered that the word means “peace” in Chinese. The Chinese language is very diverse and in another version it means “a horrific vision of you”. Let’s hope our experience with this network reveals the peaceful effort of women empowering women.


This networking site allows a group of individuals (3 Degrees Connected™) to setup a social network around some common interest. This network which was programmed in PHP and sits on a Java platform (important to programmers) has both a free and a fee-based application. As a startup organization we have chosen the free social networking version. What this means is that ning owns a piece of real estate in the lower right hand corner of our network where they place targeted advertisements.


With a fee-based network, we can eliminate the “ning” association from our login, and we control the real estate in the space targeted for advertising. I believe that as membership builds, we will select the fee-based version of this Open Sourced software and allow our members to purchase advertisements that support their business development. This premium service also allows us additional storage, bandwidth, and non-ning URL’s.

Bandwidth – a transmission rate which allows the maximum amount of information (bits/second) to pass through a channel . . . in other words, speed of data transmission and collection.


URL- stands for Uniform Resource Locator is a string of characters which identifies an address that directs a user on the World Wide Web to a website, or page. The first part of the address indicates what protocol to use. You might be familiar with “http” which stands for “hyper-text transfer protocol”. The next section of the URL is referred to as a domain name. It is easier to locate a domain name than an IP address which is list of several digits separated by periods which actually locates the website or page on the Internet (similar to the cataloging systems found in our public libraries).

If you are not Internet saavy, don't worry, we are also planning to create orientation sessions to help you navigate through all this social media hysteria.  We can assist you in setting up your own social networking page in 'ning' as well as learn other valuable internet tools to help stimulate and grow your business.

For more information about membership, please click the link below.   

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