Ning boots free users; a la carte icons arrive at LJ

[charmian]

1. Ning has recently announced an intention to go premium-only, and get rid of free users. It seems that they will be allowing free networks some weeks before booting them. According to the letter, the premium networks account for 75% of Ning's US traffic.

Are freemium services cutting back on 'free' and emphasizing the "mium"? Ah well.. generally on the web, there are no guarantees that any business is going to be there tomorrow, unless they're publicly traded and you can see their numbers, and even then, all kinds of disruptive things could potentially happen. (Disruptive technology, competitors come up with something that takes over, etc)

2. In other news, a la carte icons have finally arrived at LJ. Accompanying them are stats for Paid and Plus (and Permanent) communities, as well as Google Analytics for paying journals (but not communities). So far there seem to be some problems with/confusion about a la carte icon ordering for people who already have additional userpics. (So far Google Analytics has received little attention, as has stats for communities, in the shadow of the big announcement)

In general, users seem pleased, except perhaps for some Permanent account users, as the maximum number of icons is now no longer the same as the number of Permanent icons. (However, with this, it appears that now Permanent account holders can now have in excess of 400 icons, should they buy all of the packages)

I wonder what new feature people are going to constantly be lobbying for now, then?

Comments

[delphinapterus]

I think it's interesting they slipped in the Google Analytics with the extra user pics. I should really know more about Google Analytics than I do but I get the impression it has some privacy concerns with it?

I find the Ning going non-free sort of amusing given that just last month Ning was being talked about as a new way for everyone to connect - the next Myspace. I'm curious to see how that whole thing plays out.

[charmian]

Well, it's available on DW to paid users as well, and actually, most people don't really seem to care one way or another. I turned it on, but I rarely look at it. (And also... I need to figure out how to use it) Basically Google Analytics is a very powerful stats analysis tool. As for privacy... it's pretty much comparable to all the other stats analysis tools on that front, IIRC. It's Javascript based so it's actually more easy to turn off than server-log based stuff (where IIRC the only way of blocking that is to mess with your browser or use Tor/proxies) I keep planning to do a post on how the ubiquity of Google Analytics is in many ways kind of annoying (from the perspective of people using it on their sites) because it's so powerful that it becomes difficult for the layperson to use it.

I'm not sure if even if it were free Ning was that way, because it emphasized creating your own social networking site more than creating a site where people could connect based on person-person connections. It was kind of like a message board on steroids, with features like twitter-esque status, media sharing, putting a shop in, etc. So basically creating your own Ning group would be useless unless you had a means of attracting others to it to a point where you had enough critical mass.

[delphinapterus]

Thanks for the info on Google Analytics.

I should have clarified about Ning as the next MySpace. The way I'd heard it discussed was as a more integrated alternative for bands using MySpace as a promo space. I hadn't heard about Ning until a couple months ago when Pete Wentz and Gina Bianchini were doing a presentation at MidemNet (overview). Message board on steroids is great way to describe it.