A posting on TechCrunch highlights a shootout between Grouply and Ning.  Grouply, as stated by its CEO Mark Robins is creating a social networking interface on top of Yahoo Groups, and in so doing is leveraging that existing huge userbase, and probably marginally attracting new members to yahoo groups.  Part of the value for this must be addressing the old-hat image of what Yahoo Groups is seen as.

Ning on the other hand provides a new platform for group activity.  The values here is that they can create new forms of networking for groups without any hindrance on old style interfaces.  So, for example, they can seamlessly add blogging into a group, whereas Grouply provides non of this “extension” functionality.

So which is better?  Surely that is the key question of anyone looking at statistics.  That is can one see a measurable that is a useful indicator of performance.

Both Ning and Grouply can be measured on site hits.  So perhaps that is one useful measure?  Well actually it isn’t.  The sad thing is that many Grouply users actually may use Grouply just the same way they use Yahoo Groups before Grouply.  That is they use it as an interface to their email system.  That is they may read about what is going on in their Yahoo Groups quite effectively without ever visiting the Grouply website, via the Grouply SmartDigest tool.  The SmartDigest is a daily summary of activity across all groups.

In total contrast to interact with Ning groups one must visit the Ning website.

How key is this point?  Well if you take ANY group, whether it be on Ning, Yahoo or Google Groups or whatever just take a look at the profile of active users versus passive members, otherwise known as lurkers.  Always in any substantial group lurkers will be in the majority.  As an example, I belong to one very active group with almost 20,000 members.  This group has around 5,000 posts per month.  So my question to you is does this activity level mean that 20,000 members are interacting?

The answer is patently no.  What is probably going on is that at any given moment there are around a couple of hundred people who are actively posting.  The rest are lurking

Does all this mean that either Ning or Grouply is far better?  Are bald site statistics helpful?  I would argue that statistics are in general a poor indicator.

Let me take a theoretical comparison elsewhere on the web.  Suppose you are a horse dealer attempting to trade high-value horses.  If each horse that you wish to trade is worth, say $100k then to make a substantial business you only need a few relevant visitors to your site every month.  They key question is are they the kind of people who are customers?  Having ten million or a hundred million hits on your website will do you little good since you can only sell the horses you have in your stables.

The key word in that paragraph is “relevant”.  As a final and annoying example just search google for something and you are likely to come across a website that is rubbish.  The website is just a list of other websites that may or may not be relevant to your search.  Often such a website address has a domain name that is long and descriptive.  We have all been there, we went to google to get an answer and all we got was links to possible answers, and often these “web pages” are just directories masking themselves as useful websites.  In my opinion they are spam since they often add no content at all and Google should block these pages out of its searches.

But Google does not block them.  And as such they get a lot of hits.  Lots of hits and useless.  You takes your choice.