Type of business Subsidiary Employees <50 (2014) Area served World | Available in Multilingual Parent organization Mode Media | |
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Type of site Social networking service, Community building platform Key people Jason Rosenthal (CEO)
Marc Andreessen (Chairman) Slogan(s) The World's Largest Platform for Creating Social Websites Founded October 2004, Palo Alto, California, United States Revenue 30 million USD (2011 est.) Headquarters Palo Alto, California, United States Motto The World's Largest Platform for Creating Social Websites Founders Gina Bianchini, Marc Andreessen Profiles | ||
Ning is an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks, launched in October 2005. Ning offers customers the ability to create a community website with a customized appearance and feel; feature sets such as photos, videos, forums and blogs; and support for “Like”, plus integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo!. Ning, Inc. is owned by Mode Media.
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Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini. By June 2011 there were over 90,000 social websites running on the Ning Platform.
History
Ning started development in October 2004 and launched its platform publicly in October 2005.
At its launch, Ning was a free-form platform for the development and hosting of open-source "social applications." The source code for Ning applications was available to users, and the service made it easy for anyone to fork a Ning application, modify its PHP code and run it as their own. Applications included photo albums, blogging software, and many for sharing business reviews. In late September 2006, Ning narrowed its focus to offering a group website, a photos website, and a videos website for people to copy and use for any purpose. These three templates were later superseded by a single customizable application aimed at enabling anyone to easily create their own social network.
Ning was initially funded internally by Bianchini, Andreessen and angel investors. In July 2007, Ning raised US$44 million in venture capital, led by Legg Mason. In 2008 and 2009, the company announced it had raised an additional US$75 million in capital.
On April 15, 2010, CEO Jason Rosenthal announced changes at Ning. The free service would be suspended and of the current 167 employees, only 98 would remain. Current users of the free service had the option to either upgrade to a paid account or transition their content from Ning. For a time, Ning had its headquarters in Facebook's old office space. Once purchased by Mode Media, Ning moved to its headquarters.
Ning has 90,000 customers with social websites on the Ning Platform. Customers include bands Linkin Park, and Weezer, The Twilight Saga, Tony Hawk's Shred or Die, the Diabetes Hands Foundation's TuDiabetes, and the Brooklyn Art Project.
Features
Ning allows users to create their own communities and social networks around specific interests with their own visual design, choice of features and member data. The central feature of Ning is that anyone can create their own social network for a particular topic and catering to a specific membership base. A Ning community can be integrated with online services like Facebook, Twitter and Google.
The social networks running on Ning's service are programmed with PHP and the platform itself is built in Java. Ning added an iPhone interface in March 2009, and In October 2010, Ning launched an iOS application for network administrators to use in managing their social networks.
In February 2011, Ning introduced a new way for customers to customize and change the appearance of their Ning Networks by launching the Ning Design Studio. The feature allows customers to use pre-made templates to make custom visual changes on their community.
Removal of networks with pornography
In December 2008, Ning announced that it would no longer host networks that featured pornography and similar content. Network owners were given just over a month to move their pornographic content to another provider. The reasons cited for removing pornographic networks from the platform were that they did not cover the costs of providing them and that they created a disproportionate amount of DMCA takedown notices for copyright infringing material.
Removal of free networks
On May 4, 2010, Ning announced that they would be phasing out free networks. Email notifications to ning network customers proclaimed that free .ning networks would expire totally at midnight UTC−08:00 on Friday August 20, 2010 unless the customer decided to choose a paid plan.