Free Service Gives Everyone the Opportunity to Create Your Own Social Networks and "Make Them Yours" in Unexpected Ways
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ning, the free service that gives you the power to create your own social network for anything, today unveiled Ning Version 2, which brings together powerful new features and levels of customization not before offered by any social networking service.
Today's announcement marks a milestone for Ning, which currently boasts 30,000 social websites, and registered users in over 176 countries. With this new release, Ning gives people and businesses alike the opportunity to create their own social networks for anything and any topic.
On Ning, you mix and match your choice of features (for example, videos, photos, music, forums, profiles, and blogs) from an ever-growing list of options, customize every aspect of how your social network looks, add a logo if you have one, make it public or private, and offer your members the ability to make their profile pages uniquely their own.
"We built Ning to give everyone the opportunity to create the exact right social network for them and their community – whatever and whomever they define that to be, " says Gina Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Ning. "Everyone is different. We want people to embrace and celebrate that diversity."
Unlike other social networking services, Ning is a platform. As a platform, you don't have to appeal to Ning for the features you want. If you have the time and the inclination, you can add them yourself. Platforms give everyone the freedom to create a million variations and endless possibilities.
"Today's social networking services are fantastic, but they are very similar in approach to AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy in the early nineties. They have a fixed and rigid view of what people can do, " says Marc Andreessen, co-founder and CTO of Ning. "The web is filled with people who want the freedom to create, to express themselves, and to connect with other people in new and interesting ways. Hopefully, Ning contributes in a small way to this growing freedom for everyone. "
Your Own Social Network on Ning offers:
- Your choice of features from videos to photos, discussion forums, blogs, RSS readers, customizable member profiles, and embedding widgets from around the web.
- Complete control of how your social network looks – choose from a set of themes, customize those themes, add your own logo and images, or add your own custom HTML and CSS to get the exact right look for your network.
- Optional private or public networks, moderation, and controls.
- Custom profile questions to ask your members at sign up.
- Custom video players and photo slideshows with your logo that, when embedded, link back to your social network.
- Feature content from your members on your network's homepage.
While Ning is free to everyone, our premium services give you even more options for your new social network:
- Run your own ads on your social network -- On Ning's free service, Ning reserves the right to run ads; however, you can buy that right from Ning and run your own ads or choose to have no ads at all. -- $19.95 per month
- Use your own domain name -- If you own your own domain name and want to use it for your new social network, no problem. -- $4.95 per month
- Increase your quota -- If you are concerned that your new social network will exceed your quota, you can purchase more storage and bandwidth from us. We sell them by the "unit" of 5GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth. -- $9.95 per unit per month
About Ning
Ning is a platform for creating your own social networks for anything. With over 30,000 social networks, and people in over 176 countries, Ning makes it possible for anyone to build your own social network for free in a few simple steps. Ning is privately held and based in Palo Alto, CA. To give it a try, please visit http://www.ning.com.
