SiliconBeat

Last week, the biggest social media service most people have never heard of came out with a startling announcement. Ning, which allows you to build your own social networking site, was going to end its free service and focus on its paying customers.

The news was broken last week by Techcrunch which snagged a copy of CEO Jason Rosenthal’s memo to employees about the big change:

“When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success. My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business.”

Rosenthal has just replaced Gina Bianchini as CEO. She co-founded Ning with Mark Andreessen. The company confirmed the change in a blog post the next day:

“As many of you know, we made a decision yesterday to focus 100% of the company on enhancing the features and services we offer to paying Ning Creators. The tens of thousands of you who already use our paid service represent over 75% of our traffic, and we’ve heard repeatedly from you ways that we can deliver a killer service to help make your Ning Network more effective.”

This announcement touched off a wave of panic among users of Ning, particularly educators and non-profits. But it also set off a round of smug “I-told-you-so” posts from developers who didn’t like Ning because it was a closed, proprietary system. They had long been warning people of the risks of putting so much content and resources into a service run by an unprofitable company with no sense of what might happen to all of that information should the company go kaput.

But the reality is not so simple. And while I’m generally a fan of open source and the open Web, I also became a big fan of Ning. And I think in that seeming contradiction, there’s a lesson for people who are building Web services and tools that they want regular folks to use.

So let me talk about my experience and what I plan to do with my network going forward.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Google reported its earnings a couple of weeks ago, a lot of people who didn’t pay close attention hailed the results as a sign that the company had truly created a transcendent business model. I even heard people invoke the term “New Economy.” Funny, because when I start hearing that term, I figure trouble lies ahead.

In fact, if you parsed what Google said in its results, a lot of its profit increase came from cost savings and paring back its torrid hiring pace. Hardly the stuff of a “new economy.”

But I’m wondering now if there’s even more trouble brewing based on an email I received today about AdSense.

Read the rest of this entry »

EBay said Tuesday that Marc Andreessen has joined its board. Andreesen, who was a co-founder and a principal architect of Netscape Communications and later served as chief technology officer of America Online, which acquired the pioneering browser firm in 1998.

Andreessen also founded Opsware, formerly known as LoudCloud, a provider of data-center automation software that was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2007. His most recent endeavor is as co-founder of Ning Read the rest of this entry »

In my column that ran Wednesday in the Mercury News, I discussed my growing fatigue with trying to keep up with all the social networking services and tools. I mentioned a few that I’ve tried, and a couple I use. But I thought I’d post a more extensive list here: Read the rest of this entry »