NING Goes Premium. Hello BuddyPress!

The first major decision Jason Rosenthal took after replacing Gina Bianchini was to reduce the workforce by 40%. The second major decision was to get rid of the free community hosting service offered by NING to all its members. Ning is going premium and rolling out three new paid services:

• Ning Pro ($49.95/month or $499.95/year): The ideal solution for building a comprehensive social experience, including additional features, integration, support and bandwidth.
• Ning Plus ($19.95/month or $199.95/year): The tools and features you need to build and grow a branded social network with high engagement – an incredible value at a great price.
• Ning Mini ($2.95/month or $19.95/year): The simplest and fastest way to set up a social network for your classroom, community group, small nonprofit or family.

With the premium offerings, NING will take down all the advertisements and promotional links. One great feature is that you can choose to display your own advertisements if you wish. Rosenthal claims that over 75% of NING traffic is from paid members and the new features will help members save money. Those who want to create a social network but wish to have total control over it; we would strongly recommend #-Link-Snipped-#. BuddyPress was initially a project by Andy Peatling to add social networking features to WordPress MU powered websites. BuddyPress has been acquired by Automattic Inc, the company behind WordPress. We've used buddypress and fairly impressed by its flexibility, speed and ease of use. Plus its an add-on for WordPress which makes life easier for administrators. #-Link-Snipped-#What we like the most about BuddyPress is that it offers a nice set of plugins and themes to extend the functionality and its possible to do almost everything with BuddyPress that you can do with NING. Plus, there's a free Import from Ning: Import Ning users to WordPress and BuddyPress | Teleogistic available if you are considering migrating to BuddyPress from NING.Managing a social network is difficult (when you have over 1000 active users) and $49.95/- for pro account is fairly justified. However if you are comfortable with administration (not very difficult with WordPress & BuddyPress), BuddyPress should be your choice.