2010

Little more than a month ago, we rolled out sweeping changes to your Ning Network’s Terms of Service. As promised, I’m happy to announce that Networks Creators can now customize the terms that apply to your network and your members.

Here’s how it works.

Every Ning Network has a simplified, two-page Terms of Service at the bottom of each page. By default, these Terms include a number of items that aren’t ever permitted on the Ning Platform. You cannot edit these items. But you can now add additional terms that suit your Network’s particular design or focus. For example, a neighborhood-based network may want to limit membership to people living within a certain area.

We are happy to announce a new feature that allows you to make corrections and other copy editing changes to member content. This has been a huge ask from many Network Creators; to effectively manage your Ning Network, you need the ability to make copy edits and corrections to content your members create. Making such changes has been a very tedious process in the past. Your only options were to either contact and ask your member to edit the content (potentially a time consuming process) or delete the content (too strict in most cases).

I’m excited to introduce Leaderboards for your Ning Network. Leaderboards are ordered rankings of the top members and content on your Network, and they’re powerful for two reasons:

• For Creators, Leaderboards make it easy to discover and promote the best of your Network.
• For members, Leaderboards spark friendly competition, establish reputation, and encourage deeper, more persistent engagement.

With today’s launch, you have the power to make use of Leaderboards in the perfect way for your Network. You can view the latest trends on your Network Dashboard, add Leaderboard pages to your top-level tabs, and even add a Leaderboard module to your Main Page. Details below!

We’re getting closer to the launch of our new pricing plans on July 20th, and I’d like to take a few minutes to provide Network Creators with several additional details about the transition process for those of you who are interested in purchasing the Ning Mini plan.

For the launch of Ning Mini, Ning Plus, and Ning Pro coming up on July 20, we’ve been revisiting every limit that’s currently in place on your Ning Network today. And for each of these limits, we’ve been asking: Does it make sense?

We’ve shared many updates on our FAQ page in the past two months, but I wanted to dive in a little deeper here and explain why we’ll be removing limits that don’t make sense anymore and introducing a few additional limits that will ultimately improve the member experience.

If you’ve been reading along, you know we’re pretty excited about the ways we’ve integrated with Twitter and Facebook. Both services provide tremendous audiences for sharing and syndicating content from your Ning Network, but we also know they aren’t the only game in town, at least when it comes to social sharing.