Business

Ning Fails at Free Social Networking

Ning, a brainchild of Netscape bazillionaire Marc Andreessen that was designed to let anyone make a social network about anything for free, won’t do it anymore. Each of the service’s 2.3 million networks’ users will disappear unless its creator either pays Ning or migrate the network to another platform. So much for “free” as the […]
Ning cofounder Marc Andreesson

Ning, a brainchild of Netscape bazillionaire Marc Andreessen that was designed to let anyone make a social network about anything for free, won't do it anymore. Each of the service's 2.3 million networks' users will disappear unless its creator either pays Ning or migrate the network to another platform.

So much for "free" as the future of business -- as far as Ning goes, anyway. The company accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, and they apparently want more of a return than Ning is able to provide as a free service.

"Our premium Ning networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others … drive 75 percent of our monthly U.S. traffic, and those network creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us," wrote Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal in an e-mail to his 40-percent-reduced employees this week:

We are going to change our strategy to devote 100 percent of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning.

The service's premium offerings include faster access to Ning's support staff ($10 or $100 per month, depending on responsiveness), custom domain names ($5 per month), additional storage and bandwidth ($10 per month), removal of ads with the option to embed your own ($25 per month), and getting rid of the link at the bottom of every page that asks users to create their own social networks ($25 per month).

The ability to roll your own social network has a powerful allure, and Ning's conversion into a paid-only service could open the door for a free competitor to enter the space -- perhaps without accepting the $120 million or so in reported investment that almost certainly pressured Ning to try to extract more money from its users.

Once again -- see Tripod, Imeem, etc. -- users of a web service have had the rules switched on them once they began relying on a service. That's why it's important to choose web services that offer an easy way to grab your stuff and split -- a feature commonly known as "data portability." Luckily for Ning users who don't want to pay up, co-founder Andreesson has promised that the company offers easy escape routes.

"We are very pro–data portability," Andreessen told John Batelle of Federated Media back in 2008. "[Users] have lots of ways to get data in and out of the system. There is not a lot of demand for this yet, from either consumers or developers."

There will be now. The only question is … where will they go? Options include Group.ly, Grou.ps (which promises it "will always remain free"), Kickapps and the open-source Ruby-on-Rails platform insoshi.

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Photo: Flickr/jdlasica