Ning blog

Every day, millions of people come together across Ning Networks to explore, express, and meet new people around their interests and passions. Today, we’re giving members another meaningful way to connect with Ning Virtual Gifts.

This customizable virtual gifts offering is unique in that it can be highly relevant to the activity of your Ning Network. As a Network Creator, you can pick and choose from hundreds of virtual gifts. Best of all, you can add your own custom gifts to the Gift Store. Check out how Lost Zombies is using virtual gifts for some creative inspiration:

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Ning Apps, available today on your Ning Network. As a social platform, we’re finding that each interest and passion requires a unique combination of features. Ning Apps dramatically expand the quantity and quality of the features available on your Ning Network, and allow you to engage even further with your members.

Today you can choose from more than 90 Ning Apps, and that’s just the beginning. This number will continue to grow as developers here at Ning and around the world build additional Ning Apps tailored around your interests and passions.

Running a Ning Network is a lot like hosting an awesome party. But no matter how rocking it is, sometimes people leave and sometimes you have to kick people out. On Monday, we’ll be introducing more flexibility to the experience members have when they leave your Ning Network, and to the experience you have when you need to remove a member. These improvements will facilitate member management and keep the party going strong.

No one likes spam, especially us. It makes for a less-than-awesome Ning Network experience for members and makes a Network Creator’s life harder than it needs to be. While we’ve been building spam prevention into more and more elements of the Ning Platform, we’re constantly looking to drive more spam prevention projects that make Ning even better. Some of these projects are obvious and others are behind-the-scenes. Our ultimate goal is to eliminate spam on your Ning Network before it ever gets there.

Today, we run Google Ads on the right-hand side of Ning Networks that don’t have the Go Ad-Free premium service.

Starting this Wednesday November 4, you may notice some changes to the ads that display in this right-hand column. We will start mixing in display ads, along with the contextual text ads that you currently see. We will also start targeting ads separately to Network Creators and members, so you may begin soon to see ads that only you as the Network Creator are seeing from Ning.

Along with launching our brand-new Ning Creators Network today, we’ve also updated the design and layout of Ning.com. As we first posted here, this is the first step of a redesigned Ning.com that will be focused on Ning Network discovery, Ning Network management and no default Ning-wide profiles.

We’ll have more on this update soon, so stay tuned. Thanks!

Today, we’re rolling out a new Ning.com design with a new Ning Network discovery feature. Here’s the new Ning homepage:

This new design strives for a clean, simple and elegant design with pops of beautiful images to represent the diverse interests and passions across the Ning Platform. You’ll see these new visual changes across Ning, including the Creators, Developer, the Ning Help Center and here on the Ning Blog. Our new logo will also replace our old logo in the Ningbar you see at the top of your Ning Network. Here’s the new Ning About page:

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.

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!

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.

Or how I stopped worrying and learned to love a good online party

Creating your own social network is a lot like hosting a fabulous party. Like all parties, it usually starts with being an interesting person and a love of meeting people. Bands and porn stars work too. Just kidding.

Like any party, it also takes a little bit of preparation to take cheap beer and stale chips and turn it into a night to remember.