Hi Merlina-

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your experience/story here! If you are looking for a community network option that is dedicated to remaining free, one option would be BuddyPress as it’s an open source tool (WordPress). There are, though, always things we “pay” for when using a “free” tool: whether it’s time, energy, training, or anything else. But, it doesn’t sound like you are someone blinded to the idea of “free” – someone instead looking for an “honest” tool!

I would love to hear what tool you end up going with (webs or otherwise) and how your transition or set up process goes. Please do share back here for other readers trying to navigate similar decisions for the management of their community sites!

Up-date:

On reflection, any provider of social networking tools is always going to be subject to a possible change of regime and so there’s no guarantee that any free service is always going to be there. Having looked in to webs.com they do look like the best alternative at present. In a recent interview, their CEO, Haroon Mokhtarzada, said
” We’ve been free for 9 years and will continue to remain a free service (that’s right Ning users, come on over!)”

For more info see:
http://blog.webs.com/2010/04/16/webs-welcomes-ning-users-with-open-arms-and-free-accounts-

Good luck with the petition, but I rather suspect a mass migration to a competitor may turn out to be the most effective in persuading Ning to think again…..

My immediate reaction to Ning’s decision to withdraw the free service is anger and disgust. If it was clear that it was absolutely necessary for Ning to do this in order to be financially sustainable I might be more understanding. But this smacks to me of blatant hard nosed commercialism, driven purely by maximising profits for their shareholders. It makes me question the ethics and ‘corporate values’ of Ning and all other similar ‘social networking’ services.

The fact is, non-paying network creators, through investing their time and effort into creating and maintaining sites, have been attracting and driving traffic to Ning and promoting the brand. The ‘free’ sites carry Ning’s advertising which generates a revenue for Ning. If, in addition to this, 75% of their network creators pay in any case, I cannot see the justification for this decision. This looks like corporate greed.

Even if I could afford to pay up-front for Ning’s services I am now unwilling to do so, on principle, and shall now be exploring alternatives. One strong contender is Webs.com which offers a free website creation service with applications for turning it into a social network, and the possibility to up-grade to premium services.

However, I will now want to question the corporate values and commitment to keeping the free service free before committing a lot of time and energy into creating a network using their service.

Thanks, Caroline! Really appreciate you sharing the the links and information about the Elgg communities. Would be most interested in hearing (not sure if you know or are involved) how they made the decision to build on Elgg, what other tools they considered, and so on.

Appreciate you pitching in here!

HI Marty-

Thanks for contributing to the conversation here. “You get what you pay for,” is always a hard thing to measure, especially before an organization has ever used networking platforms before to have the experience/knowledge. Would love to hear what tools your colleagues have used and even share links to their networks if possible just as examples.

Thanks again