Very shocked today as I am catching up on a serious backlog of RSS news items to see that NING a popular DIY social networking site where by you are able to create your own social network ala facebook about any product, service, idea, whatever you like with features such as posting content, media and adding friends have now scrapped their free service and opted for a tiered pricing model.
This has personally come as a surprise as I personally know several people managing relatively decent sized social networks on Ning and cannot see them paying for such tiered pricing to continue their community when facebook would offer pretty much the same service for free. The pricing levels Ning have introduced are not over priced at all starting from around $3/month with its core features and going up in price dependant on a variety of factors that the user would wish to bolt onto their “social networking website”.
Tiered plans are rolling out in June and we shall see the true backlash of this as many users will undoubtedly flock to Facebook for a “newly released” community page which is a branch from the popular “Pages” used by businesses and the like. Others I suspect if they are serious about their social network website on Ning will opt to spending money creating a true self owned platform/website and shell out the initial cost as opposed to paying a monthly fee.
Ning ID is also being chopped which in a sense is a good thing, this was a single sign on created by ning so you would be able to sign into any social network hosted by ning with a single username/password combination. I say its a good thing because now we have so many other single sign on platforms ranging from the age old Microsoft Passport, to the variety of OpenID providers and of course the fairly newcomers of Google, Twitter and Facebook connect programs.
What is your view on Ning?
Related posts:
