How To Use Ning To Host Your Own Social Network
By Anna Johnson on April 20th, 2009If you like the idea of running your own social network, consider Ning. Ning is a hosted social network platform you can use to create, tailor and host your own social network.
Ning now hosts over a million social networks and offers you the ability to customize the look and feel of your network, create unique member profiles, control who can join your network, invite new members via a rich invitation engine, dynamically display activity on your network, and more.
Since it’s a hosted service, you don’t have infinite control and freedom over your social network, but that may not really matter depending on what you’re aiming to achieve.
Ning has both free and paid options. The free (default) version displays ads controlled by Ning. You can eliminate or control those ads by paying a monthly fee.
There are also some other paid-for, premium services such as extra storage, bandwidth and non-Ning URLs.
Source: Athena von Oech, “One Million Social Networks on Ning!” Ning Blog, April 16, 2009
