Why I'm leaving Ning

Hi Colleagues,

Like many of you I started a few nings.

It was exciting; a safe (well.....don't look at the ads), closed easy to use space that was infinitely customisable. And the cost? Free!

I got my entire school staff into it and they used it to share ideas, jokes schedule meetings - all the stuff you'd imagine an online faculty room to look like. I also got students travelling to Japan with our school to form a Ning - a place of discussion about homestays, food and preparations.

All fantastically useful....and free!

But, now I'm off - and I'm taking my people with me.

I'm off to grou.ps to start again. I was going to stay and go with the 'free edu mini ning' option but, to be honest, I lost faith. Maybe in the fine print it might have said 'free until it's not'; but

grou.ps is free up to 100Gb of traffic which for my puposes is ample
grou.ps actually seems better - easier to use, more controllable and more versatile

So at this point, I can't think of a reason to stay - yeah, we'll lose some stuff, but that's life. Like moving house and losing your clock-radio in the process....and then getting an iphone instead....and then downloading 23 apps in order to get the same functionality as a clock-radio...oh bugger it, this analogy is rubbish.

I can understand why ning chose this path - I'm just not going to be travelling with them. Good luck Ning.

Tags: ning

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Permalink Reply by MariaD on May 17, 2010 at 4:13am

I see one good thing coming from the whole Ning experience: people are pushed to become more nomadic and to use web as a platform, rather than clinging to the old "private property" (spatial) thinking. It's more like living out of an RV. Moving house is as easy as pulling a plug.

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Permalink Reply by Amanda Kenuam on May 17, 2010 at 7:19am

These WERE the Days of Our Ning | http://ow.ly/1LZ7B

I'll have to check out grou.ps - never heard of it! Thanks for the heads up.

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Permalink Reply by Juan Pablo Velez Barragan on May 17, 2010 at 8:31am

just took a look at grou.ps (the site recommended by Cameron...thank you very much) and it looks great.

in the registration, there seems to be an option to "migrate a ning network". I'm not sure exactly what that means (content? users? everything?), but it might be a better option for this network than the poorly-defined "educational mini-ning". thoughts?

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Permalink Reply by Anthony VonBank on May 17, 2010 at 8:41am

I would ditto everything this user has mentioned. I used it, pushed it, loved it, and now I started GROU.PS, and pretty happy with it...

NING is going to regret this, I bet... GROU.PS usership is increasing rapidly...