Ning recently replaced its long-time CEO Gina Bianchini with COO Jason Rosenthal and, as with any shift in power, changes were to follow.  If you work for Ning the bigg news was that they cut 40% (70 peeps) of their staff, for the rest of us the big announcement was that they would no longer offer free accounts.  That means all existing free Ning sites would either have to transition to a premium service or go elsewhere.

Most of the people I questioned on this topic replied with “What’s Ning?”  If you’re one of these people I’ll go ahead and clear up the mystery.  Ning is a hosted service that allows you to create your own network very much like Myspace.  And I don’t mean that you can have your own page like on Myspace, but the network itself.  So if you were into Poodles you could have a Poodle network and all of your Poodle peeps could have their very own Poodle page on your site.  Sweet right!

Yeah it is.  Ning does this quite well really.  When you think of a free (or formerly free) service the picture that comes to mind is something very ghetto and ugly.  And while that may not be far from the truth, Ning could be styled to look quite nice by the right person. And the tools provided by ning are down right decent. Very few products are able to match this service and I’ll bet they stay alive for years to come - even without the freebies.

In my practice I tend to do a healthy amount of Ning build-outs. Luckily all of my clients have premium networks and won’t be negatively affected by the changes. And I’m okay with letting my own free NIng sites die as they were essentially my testing grounds but I had just spent a chunk of my precious time designing a Ning site for a family member.  Oh well.

I’m guessing this will be a good move for Ning.  They’ve been around long enough to know where they stand popularity wise and cutting the dead weight should free up valuable resources which will now be able to focus on serving their paying clients.  Sounds good to me.

Below are a few examples of Ning sites I’ve styled: