Ning Network is Nang. The owners move from social networking to greed

Ning is no longer a free network that they once promised to be. Now that they have gotten a lot of support, they have decided to impose monthly fees (really ridiculous amounts, actually) in order to keep your network going. So all the 18 months of work I am my network of 36 journalism associates is not out the window.

No pay, no play.

Ning sucked. It was limiting. It boasted that if offered all these great options but they mostly don't work or never did what was promised. You can bring people together and create chat rooms and put your profile on the Ning Network. Wow. Big deal. You can even blog there, although the blog is not automatically indexed on any search engines like Google.

I can do all of that for Free on Facebook where I have 2200 friends who share my interests and read my many columns on Middle East peace, social networking media (like this blog) and on US politics, including in CHicago where politics and the retirement of Mayor Richard M. Daley has sent the Chicagoland region rocking.

So why would I pay to get far less from Ning?

Because they are not social networkers at all. They are geeks. And Geeks like to write fascinating programs that do fascinating things that THEY think normal people like to do but the fact is that because they are geeks, they are not normal people so they have no idea what a normal person needs in terms of a software program.

That's the failing of companies created by Geeks. They think they know and write all these press releases about what they know, but the truth is they know squat, which actually is probably more than what they know.

The best software programs and online systems are those written by Geeks who are directed by people's needs, not their bean-counting vision of what they think would be cool. Geek crap is not cool.

Ning is even less cool today.

Send the Ning Nang back to internet Sing Sing.

They suck

-- Ray Hanania
www.RadioChicagoland.com

(distributed by the Hanania Media Network)