Category: ning

GoNing, GoNing … Gone

~ Chris Jobling ~ 2 Comments

The deadline for free Ning sites passed in July and any free Ning sites have to be upgraded to a paid plan by 20th August this year or risk deletion. The site eg-353.ning.com which I created for the HEFCW funded enhancement peer-support project is doomed unless I pay the $19.95 per month fee to keep it alive ($199.95 per year with one month free if bought before 3rd August).

There is an archive function: an Adobe AIR application that connects to your Ning site and downloads the membership lists and textual content (forums, blogs, events etc) as JSON files and downloads your uploaded media as documents. It stores the whole lot in a folder on your desktop.

From a data integrity point of view, this is not a bad solution. I presume that the JSON files are populated from the fields of the associated database tables and should therefore be pretty complete. From a non-technical user’s point of view, it’s useless! It is possible to open the JSON file in a text editor and extract the good stuff for a page-by-page reconstruction of your network on another platform. However, for a more complete solution, it would require some programming expertise and knowledge of JavaScript to reconstruct your social network from the raw data — even if the result of the conversion was just a static web site. (In fact, a static web site was what I expected that the archive would be).

I am tempted to pay the monthly fee to keep the files around, at least until the end of the funded project, but as a migration route for general users, Ning’s archive facility is disappointing. My other Ning network, SEA SALT, which I created for the Beginner’s Guide to Social Engineering reported earlier, also needs to be archived. There is talk of an alternative being developed within the SALT team, but if SALT, or anyone else wanted to keep the old one running in the interim, get in touch and we’ll see if there’s a way.

Alternatives to Ning

~ Chris Jobling ~ 3 Comments

A brief survey of alternatives to Ning with comments. Please feel free to extend the list.

Cloud Hosted
The following were recommended by JP in a discussion “The Best, Most Reliable and Trusted Freemium Social Network Alternatives.” on the Ning Creators community site. I haven’t tried any of them.

  • Ning – paradoxically, the paid-for version of Ning may prove to be the best alternative to free Ning. It should at least be familiar, and there are hints of attractive price points for non-profits and educational communities.
  • Spruz – is already wooing Ning community builders and is top of JP’s list. Free site option and premium features from $9.95 a month.
  • SocialGo – is second on JP’s list. The free version is quite generous in terms of storage and bandwidth but the price jumps to $24.99 a month for the advertising-free “premium” version with custom domain.
  • Grou.psbeta – is third on JP’s list and also offers to migrate your Ning site on the sign-up page. Price is free for 10Gbyte of storage and 100GByte data transfer (per month?). Prices for premium editions rise according to a complex tiered system of credits based on memory and bandwidth usage, so it might prove unpredictably pricey for a very busy site.

In addition to these suggestions, Gbswales introduced me to bîgtent which looks good from the outside, and for which I could find no pricing details. This means either that it’s completely free (but presumably advertising funded) or that the prices are only revealed after you’ve signed up.

As a wise man once said though, “you get what you pay for”, but I’d nonetheless be interested in your views if you’ve used any of these, or suggestions of others that are worth a look.

Vapour Ware

A couple of interesting cloud-based possibilities are “coming soon”:

  • elgg.com is planning to release subscription-based services based around the open-source Elgg platform. Prices will be in the range $29.95-$49.95 per month. Launching in May 2010.
  • drupalgardens.com is another hosting service that is currently in beta testing. It plans to make sites based around the popular open-source CMS framework Drupal easy to build. A free version is available and subscription services start at $19.95 per month. Drupal is more general purpose than the other social networking platforms, and it may take some work to get it to work like a social network. An interesting feature mentioned in the video is that you can build your site in the cloud then export if for self-hosting!

“Ground” Hosted

If you have some technical expertise and can host your own platform, the three best choices today are probably Elgg, BuddyPress and Drupal. All three are open source applications released under the GPL license. They are all relatively easy to set up providing you are not afraid of Apache, PHP and MySQL and can manage the Unix command line. The advantage of “ground hosting” is that you would have control of the server and the software. The disadvantage is that you or someone in IT support would have to maintain it!

In brief:

  • Elgg was our first choice of a Plan B platform for a project that we are currently working on when the announcement of Ning’s change of service was announced. It is no stranger to Swansea university because the Oremi Pilot was based on an early version (pre 1.0 release I think) of Elgg.
  • BuddyPress is an attractive proposition because it is a “plug-in” for the WordPress Multiuser (WordPressμ) blogging platform that is already in use at Swansea (see blog.swansea.ac.uk).
  • Drupal is a sophisticated content management framework that can be used to create a social network but could also be used to create a range of web applications ranging from a university web site through to a photo sharing site via a roll-your-own VLE. Because it is so sophisticated, out of the box it would require a lot more work to create a functioning social network than either of the two alternatives. But for the ultimate in control and extensibility, it would be hard to beat. The export feature to be provided by drupalgardens.org may provide a way to overcome some of these initial hurdles. I’ll be able to tell you more when I’ve had a chance to play with it.

So there you have it, some suggestions for school or institutional social networks.

If your needs are more prosaic, say you want some simple social interaction on a module or with a small group of students, don’t forget the possibilities offered by the Learning Objects blogs, wikis and podcasts within Blackboard, and Twitter, FriendFeed or even Facebook if you prefer to go your own way.

Reactions to the Ning "Bombshell"

~ Chris Jobling ~ 4 Comments
April 15, 2010
  • TechCrunch was early to the news of Ning’s change of strategy, which at the time was still known only to a few members of the Ning creator’s network.
  • Posterous announced that it would be building a Ning blog importer for free — but that still leaves all the other content up in the air.
  • Steve Hargadon, Social Learning Consultant for Eluminate, and moderator of Classroom 2.0 (A paid-for Ning network), has blogged about the Ning Changes and the Impact on Educational Communities. In the comments, Steve Verjans mentions a public Google Doc that has been created to document some alternatives to Ning: http://is.gd/buqJ0; and Lucy Gray is collecting user stories in http://tinyurl.com/ningsfornonprofits. Steve will be hosting a discussion on Eluminate, tomorrow night (21st April) at midnight GMT (1.00 am BST). See Steve’s blog posting for details.
  • D’Arcy Norman “On the Ning exodus” put his finger on the issue when he posted

    WordPress/BuddyPress and Drupal and any of a long list of others can provide the functionality of Ning. But, in order to protect yourself from another potential service change/interruption, you really need to provide a server. […] You need to copy files to the server. You need to configure a database and tweak things. This is where the people that use Ning in the first place are lost. They can’t/won’t do this.

16 April, 2010
Jack Schofield commented on the Ning announcement in the Guardian Technology Blog (Ning social network site is going from freemium to paid-for). His conclusion:

This is a useful reminder that no free online service is guaranteed to remain free, or even to survive. Indeed, it’s a fair bet that at least 90% will, in the long term, disappear. Those lured with the bait of cloud computing should bear this in mind and make sure they have complete backups of all their data, plus an exit strategy for when the worst happens.

will be taken to heart by this author.

17 April, 2010
19 April, 2010

So that’s it for now. We’ll know more in May when Ning finally announces its new pricing models. For me, this has to be the quickest e-learning fad I’ve ever promoted, from best-thing-since-sliced-bread to toast in 48 hours!

Ning … here today, gone tomorrow.

~ Chris Jobling ~ 4 Comments

Just noticed this post (No more Ning) from James Clay which comments on this post on the Ning creator’s network which tell’s us that Ning is planning to phase out its free social networks to concentrate on their paid customers. The timing is immaculate: on the day as on which I’d been promoting Ning to this community, creating a new Ning site for evaluation as a host for Sea SALT, and encouraging people to sign up, on the other side of the Atlantic the newly installed CEO of Ning is laying off staff and pulling out the rug from under me!

It was early days and so nothing much will be lost if Sea SALT has to be dismantled before it’s established. But of more concern is the fact that Ning is hosting the peer support site that we’re using for one of the HEFCw projects, and we’re going to need a replacement for that fast! Luckily, we have already established a Facebook page for that, and we were starting to conclude that that might be the best place to host that community anyway.

As for Sea SALT, I guess that you get what you pay for, and even though there are hints that educational sites may be a special case, it seems prudent to hold back from investing further time and effort to grow communities on top of a service that may be gone tomorrow. But if this community likes the idea of a social-network based community, we need to have a plan B. Self hosted free open-source social network services include Elgg (which used to host Oremi) and the Buddy Press plugin for the WordPress Multiuser edition. In addition Learning Objects’ new Campus Pack Fusion Community Areas look to have potential. All three would be perfectly viable, but all would require support from LIS. The current pricing of Ning is currently $4.95 a month to use our own domain and $25 per month to go add free. That be low enough for SALT to bear the cost. On the other hand, we are already paying for Learning objects and I’m told that the new Campus pack will cost the same as we’re currently paying.

Interesting times. Discuss them here, or follow this link to Sea SALT to register and have your say in the forum … while it lasts!

Beginner's Guide Social Engineering

~ Chris Jobling ~ Leave a comment

(Warning, this post contains really bad puns!)

EG-353 – an Engineering Research Project module, has been using the Ning social networking platform all year as part of an e-learning enhancement project on Peer Support and Assessment. On 15th April, I will be presenting a Staff Development Unit Lunch and Learn session in which I plan to show you how it was done, how it went and how you could do it too.

Although it’s only a fortnight away, I’ve only just started thinking about what I’d actually do in the presentation. But having started to plan, I thought that it would be relevant to the audience and the Learning Lab if I was to create, live before your very eyes, a Ning site for SALT/Learning Lab.

Why?

Although the Learning Lab has some social features, namely a delicious network, group blog, wiki, Google-driven open social blog following features, RSS feed aggregation, Facebook page and Twitter stream, it’s still pretty much a web site and isn’t what most people would today understand as a social network.

Why Ning?

Ning is a free (that is advertising funded) Internet application that allows you to create your own custom social network for your own purposes. I’ve been using it, as the opening paragraph of this post implies, as a test-bed for a student peer support network. I think that it might work to improve communications amongst learning and teaching staff here at Swansea and to strengthen the community of practice on campus.

How?

I propose a four step recipe

  • Preparation via prototype
  • Launch and learn(!)
  • Main course
  • Dessert

Preparation

As part of the preparation for the Lunch and Learn session, I have created a prototype/sandbox Ning site which I’ve called Sea-Salt (pun intended). If you are interested in exploring Ning either as a user or an administrator, or you would just like to come to my session and want to see what a Ning network feels like, drop me a line at C.P.Jobling at Swansea.ac.uk and I’ll create an account for you.

Launch and Learn

In the how it’s done part of the session, you will see me creating the proposed SALT Ning. If you’re coming to the session, you can become the first members of the SALT Ning when it goes live. You’ll need to send me your Swansea University email in advance, and you’ll will need a laptop and/or a smart phone that’s connected via WiFi to campus email to complete the registration during the session.

Main course

In the rest of the session, I propose for the how you can do it too part of the session to show you the features that you have as a member of the Ning network, and some of the administration features that you would have access to in your own class-based Ning.

The how it went section will give some tips and tricks that I’ve learned or picked up about creating and maintaining community engagement.

Dessert

If there’s any time left, I might mention some of the alternatives to Ning that you might want to try instead.

Lunch is included!

If this post has whetted your appetite, you can sign up for the session by contacting Sue Ace in SDU by email (S.V.Ace at Swansea.ac.uk) or phone (01792 295762). The session is called “A Beginner’s Introduction to Social Engineering” and it takes place between 13.00 and 14.00 on Thursday 15 April in the Staff Development Unit.

Comments Welcome

This is very much a proposal, so if you have any comments about the proposed session, objections to using Ning for SALT, or anything else, the comment field below awaits your feedback.