There are media reports that Ning.com may phase out its free model. Talk about local trains people as a public service to use free platforms to find an effective local voice online. We train people in wordpress.com and ning.com – by a long way wordpress.com is the most popular platform amongst our trainees. However, talk about local trainees have produced some good local nings.
We are quite clear that we shall help our trainees that have local nings. This could be help in migration or other support. But first we need to understand what Ning intends to do and how the market repsonds to that. Posterous is already building a Ning importer, SocialGo provides an alternate social network and Facebook is slowly becoming a local platform – there’s even Foursquare although that is yet to make it big in the UK. Other alternatives will emerge. We should be happy to host a UK seminar on migration of hyperlocal sites from nings as more facts become clear and we expect this to be discussed at tomorrow’s #TAL10 hyperlocal unconference.
We suspect that there will be a strong backlash from ning’s customers and the wider web community. This has not yet played out. Using the web is all about adapting to unexpected change and we shall help our customers through this one. We shall post further in the next few days.
William Perrin
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I think it’s best to host and own your own social network. SocialGo is just another version of Ning. I’d suggest that users start looking for something open and robust, so you can build your community with confident.
http://www.jomsocial.com seems like a good alternative with its matured products with many usable extensions from Joomla.
Thank goodness you are providing help. Thanks Annette
“Other alternatives will emerge.”
Thousands of people are crowdsourcing a document right now: http://bit.ly/a4PGp3
(those of you on slower computers might want to close everything else before you try to access it)