Social network NING will soon be pay to play

Jason Rosenthal, the new CEO at Ning.com officially announced today that Ning will phase out free services in July, 2010.
Users who want to keep their position on Ning will be offered three choices:
Ning Pro ($49/month or $499/year), Ning Plus ($20/month or $199.95/ year), and Ning Mini ($3/month or $19.95/year). We are told that teachers and students will be allowed to keep their free service.

Marc Andreessen (Netscape and Oppsware) cofounded Ning in 2004. The website provided a place for people to set up their own social network for free. I didn't know there was a paid version available until this week even though I claimed my own small piece of Ning since 2006.

Rosenthal is quoted in SFgate as saying that paid users accounted for 80% of Ning's revenues. This tells me that the folks who visit Ning do not click on Adsense ads very often. I suspect this is probably true at Squidoo as well where people are encouraged to put up web pages with absolutely no need to use HTML. One wonders if Squidoo will follow the lead of Ning and start charging for its service.

Rosenthal said Ning has a $4 Billion market opportunity. This would be twice the cost of YouTube to Google and it is hard to see that kind of numbers for Ning. Having said that, nothing in the realm of Internet site value surprises me any more.

Here is an update on the Ning website.

For my money, I would rather keep my membership at Ryze.com unless Ning implements a better and much more user friendly forum area.

Greg Cryns

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The Mighty Mo Website Design and Promotions

A different networking approach

I am a long time member of the Ryze.com community. Lots of people know me or know of me there since I have a bulletin board network with about 5,000 members. I also made a ton of posts there over the years.

I received a private message from someone I don't know. Yes, I may have chatted with this person online once, but I'm not even sure of that.

Below is the message he sent. What is interesting about the note is that he writes as though we've been friends all along.

Know what? This is a good idea! You can bet I will remember his name the next time I see it, or I may get a fuzzy feeling when I do see the name.

Is this good networking? I think it could open doors. What do you think?

Here is the message:


Hi Greg,

It's been awhile since I dropped you a line. Sorry, life get's in the way sometimes I am sad to say. I need to prioritize better. Having fun takes up a lot of time.

Anyway, hope all is well over there and not too cold!

Jen & I had a great day yesterday, (Saturday) diving off the Sunshine Coast, a one hour drive north of Brisbane.

We had three dives at Caves Reef, about 20 minutes off the coast. On dive 1 we saw a massive Crayfish, just sitting at the bottom of the anchor chain. On dive 2 we caught up with a turtle. It was about 3 feet long and just resting in a hideaway watching as swim by. Very cute. Then on dive 3 for the day, a giant school of colourful fish, don't ask me what type as I still have to do that part of the course.

Needless to say we slept well last night.

They have sunk a Navy ship, the HMAS Brisbane not that much further north and we plan on diving that in a couple of weeks. Oh, just incase you were wandering, the water temp was 26 C, think thats high 70's F. Are you guy's C or F?

Today is going to be a nice relaxing day of recovery. Sunday breakfast with some friends, then catch up with one of my daughters, Seth's mum. He's 4mths old now and all smiles.

Take care,

(name withheld)

What other networking techniques have you tried? Please post them in comments.

Greg Cryns
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