Keep up with your social network from your iPhone
Ning’s Tips and Tricks
Every social network on Ning comes with an iPhone interface, which is great when you want to keep up with your social network when not at your computer. Using this interface, members with iPhones can access a simplified version of your social network that looks great, matches your social network’s colors and loads quickly, even on a 2G iPhone.
To access the iPhone interface, you simply need to add /m to the URL of your social network. For example, to access Brooklyn Art Project on an iPhone, you would head to #m
Using the iPhone interface, you can view photos on the social network, and photos will even rotate to accommodate the direction in which the phone is being held. You can also view embedded YouTube videos and scroll, over multiple pages, through your social network’s Latest Activity.
After scouring recent activity, photos and videos, you can browse members of your social network — and add people as friends or leave comments on their profile pages. And your social network’s forum is completely accessible on the iPhone interface. You can start a discussion or reply to existing discussions. Check back tomorrow for ideas on letting your members know about this feature.
I like the moble version of our site. I would like to make an app for this though. I want to have an app on my iphone and itouch so it has our logo on it and i can hit it and go directly to the network, just like twitter, just like facebook. I am looking in to making an app if this is even possible. I want to know if you have developed anything yet so it will make my life easier. Our community has really blown up and having an app would make a huge difference.
Thank You ! 🙂
I, too, love the iPhone app. Having a mobile interface is wonderful.
I’m also puzzled as to why blogs are not on the app’s menu? Our network, propenmic.org, is heavily weighted toward blog activity. Hope you will add that to the app. Many of our members would use it.
Thank you.
What about the Blogs? Why has this been kept out of the interface?
Great other than that!
-HKS
Hi TuTu Fairy!
We don’t have plans for the next couple of months to incorporate the Events feature into your social network’s iPhone interface. However that’s certainly something we’ll look to do down the line.
Thanks,
Mackenzie
Our group meets on a regular basis and use the events feature all the time. Is the ability to view events going to be added it the future? That feature would just make the overall interface an amazing addition to interaction with the site.
This is terrific. I for one am glad to see a iPhone formatted version of our site. As a current iPhone users, I wonder if an Ning iPhone App will become available anytime soon?
Hi Ra-Ausar!
We’re not developing an iPhone app at the moment, but that’s something we’re looking at for the future.
One additional “bonus” function of the iPhone interface is that can also be viewed from a desktop client. I’ve found a few uses for this:
1- It makes it easy for Network Creators to dig deep into the latest activity feed there (more than just the last 20 items) to look for interesting or suspicious activity.
2- Also, the iPhone activity feed still includes the member photos instead of activity class icons, giving you a more visual overview of who is active.
3- The new photo slideshows on the iphone interface are a MUCH faster way to look for problem images that might have been uploaded.
4- When you click an embedded YouTube movie icon on the iphone interface, it opens an interesting expandable full-window movie player without going to YouTube. Try it!
Evan if Events can be incorporated onto this (including google maps) you would make this nice feature AMAZING. Any thoughts?
I was thinking of getting an iPhone soon since I like it’s scheduled updates, so this is wonderful!
One part I’m upset about the phone is that I found out that it doesn’t support Flash! So does this mean that the chat won’t work on it?
Hi Shy!
I’m happy to hear you’re a fan of the iPhone interface. We definitely are as well 🙂
At this time, Flash doesn’t work on the iPhone — and Chat on your social network isn’t accessible either. We hope to add it in the future, so thanks for your feedback!