Ning Shutting Down Its Free Service. Time to Take Control of Your Network

Ning.com will will end its free social networking service and cut 70 people from its staff list.

This news may have come as a shock to Ning's free users, especially for non-profit and educational groups that have been relying on Ning for social networking solutions. It is effectively forcing users to become paid users or migrate elsewhere. But the bad news is, it's not that easy to migrate from Ning.

Ning's move seems like a betrayal to its users, who have spend countless hours into creating their social network, just to be disappointed under a promise of free service. This is not the first time Ning's users have been disappointed. In October 2008, Ning decided to close its REST API, making it harder for network admins to migrate their members outside of Ning.com.

This unfortunate event should have been a sign to social managers that owning the platform for your community is important. Social managers have to start taking control and ownership of their users and the contents of their social networks.

Currently JomSocial is finding the best way to help Ning users to migrate from their  free service. In the meantime, Ning's users have to rely on the build in exporter to get their members data in a CSV file.

More info here:
http://creators.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-to-export-your-members-to We are working on a tool to help migrate Ning's content and users to JomSocial, before Ning start banning all of the free social networks.