No more free nings

I saw a lot of sad tweets tonight about Ning's announcement from tech educators I follow on Twitter – educators who created classroom "nings" (mini, user-created social-network sites), professional-development "nings" and activist "nings." Creating a site on Ning will no longer be free, I read in CNET, "free" being just one of the service's attractions to educators (and a whole lot of other people). I remember last fall hearing a speaker at the Safer Internet Forum in Luxembourg say that soon the country's Education Ministry would be introducing Ning for teachers' social networking nationwide (see this), and tonight Steve Hargadon of Elluminate and Classroom 2.0 blogged that Ning has been "a great springboard" for educational networking. Anyway, the news broke yesterday that Ning would be "cutting 40% of its staff and axing its free, ad-supported service," according to CNET. Wrote TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid, to whom someone apparently sent the internal memo about the staff cuts from Ning's CEO (published in full on that page), "I suspect we’ll see quite a few active networks jump to whatever the cheapest premium option is," which may spell more fundraisers at schools lucky enough to have teachers setting up classroom nings! [Here's my first post about Ning three years ago, "Mini-MySpaces: New phase," with a comment from co-founder Marc Andreeson (even better known as co-creator of the first Web browser, Mosaic)!]

Ning adds virtual gifts

Seems all the social sites are taking a queue from virtual worlds and letting users buy and sell virtual goods (e.g., virtual clothes, furnishings, holiday stuff, even hair-dos). Now Ning.com, the site that lets users create their own social networks, is letting them create their own virtual gifts, "bringing a built-in virtual goods store to the site’s 1.6 million networks," TechCrunch reports. So, for example, the "Brooklyn Art Project network can offer gifts that are miniature versions of hand-drawn artwork" and "the New Kids on the Block" network can sell gifts like the bandmembers’ faces," TechCrunch adds. Meanwhile, Marketing Vox reports that the virtual goods market will hit $1 billion this year. For background on Ning, see "Zillions of social network sites" and "Anyone can have a social site now."

Zillions of social network sites

There are now more than 1 million social network sites. Some may hear that and think, "Wow, a million+ Facebook- and MySpace-type sites?!" Well, sorta. What Mashable's actually reporting on with that figure is Ning's explosive growth. In the fewer than four years since Ning's launch, more than a million mini-MySpaces have sprung up on its network. These are smaller, more narrow-interest social network sites - from those focused on a particular celebrity to cooking to a conference to a local club - with all the same features (video, photos, groups, blogs, comments, etc.). This is different from MySpace and Facebook, which are huge and general - more social utilities than nings. Just another sign of the diversification of fixed and mobile social-Web use (see "Where will online teens go next?"). Meanwhile, here are very recent rankings of the big "stand-alone" social network sites from Hitwise and Nielsen at SocialNetworkingWatch.com.

Ning to delete all adult content

Ning, a site where anyone can create his or her very own social-networking site (see "Mini-MySpaces") and where people are doing so at a rate of "around 2,000 new networks a day, announced the end of its "red-light district" this week . It's a relatively small red-light district - Ning told me less than 1% of its more than 600,000 social networks - but apparently legal adult content was becoming a business problem. "We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that's where this is heading," CEO Gina Bianchini wrote in Ning's blog. Ning has a reputation for strict compliance with federal law requiring ISPs to report illegal child-abuse imagery ("child porn"), so that was never allowed, but the legal stuff, Bianchini indicates, interestingly, was creating "a rise in volume of illegal adult social networks." The adult networks disappear by January 1, she said. This development is great news for all the other social-network creators - teachers, parents, artists, athletes, journalists, hobbyists, cancer survivors, alumni groups, government entities (e.g., the US State Department), and businesses. But if anyone's eyebrows are raised upon hearing that all these social site owners were on the same service as porn operators, it's important for you to know that people don't browse around Ning the way they might, possibly, a social networking site (and even then, most teen users just go to their own and their friends' profiles). Ning isn't a social site. It's a giant collection of social sites. Its member social networks are the destinations, not Ning itself. Here's coverage at CNET. A bit more interesting data on Ning as a global resource from Fast Company magazine last May: "About 40% of Ning's social networks originate outside the United States, and members from 176 countries have signed up, with the service already available in several languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Dutch."