About a month ago we started to see some announcements from Ning that made us wonder whether trouble was brewing. Today Ning announced the end of their long time free online community service and a cut of nearly half of their staff. Although this bodes well for other online community platforms, there are a lot of nervous Ning customers out there today – some of our clients included.
Given today’s events, I thought I would take a moment to discuss one of the core values of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS): Free. As in Libre.
Over the last year we’ve helped several clients deploy social networks on the Ning platform. Our early Ning deployments were elegant, but traditional: we helped member organizations create rich, dynamic online member communities. Recently, we’ve been breaking out of that box.
Earlier this year, we customized an instance of Ning for FIRST Credit Union in British Columbia, creating a social network that enables their staff to meet up and share ideas online. The project included a custom design (implemented via CSS), custom home page components (via the Ning API), and some creative hiding and renaming of core features (using CSS and JavaScript).
Continue reading Introducing the “Ning-tranet”