Accepted and Enrolled Student Communities using Ning: No Longer Free, Never Was Good

Michael Staton

Ning just announced they’re killing the free version of their niche social networks.

In the battle of Ning vs. Facebook, Facebook won big time.  People are more interested in connecting with their friends than with niche communities….  Or, are they?  Kind of….

With Facebook, you have a product that doesn’t try to address any industry/community specific problems or meet their specific needs.  It’s just a blanket tool.  It’s blunt, but it’s what you’ve got.  (Unless you’re using our app!).  No one expects more, really.

However, if you talk to Higher Ed administrators about Facebook, they will rattle off scores of possibilities: “Wouldn’t it be cool if Facebook was a Portfolio tool?”  or “How can we use Facebook as a Student Retention tool?”  There’s obviously still industry and community specific needs and desires.

With Ning, users wanted to use the private communities as a way to address these industry/community specific needs.  But, it was also a blanket tool.  Ning also didn’t address industry/community specific needs.

If you evaluate Ning (or Facebook Groups/Pages) according to our guidelines for evaluating Admitted and Enrolled Student Social Networks, it falls up short.  It was a free tool that was trying to avoid building to needs in Higher Education.

We build Schools on Facebook℠ to specifically address needs in Higher Education.  And, according to our market research, that’s worth it for the Higher Ed community.

What are your thoughts?  Are you willing to pay for a Ning community that used to be free and but doesn’t really solve your problems?  Do you see possibilities for niche social networks in Higher Education?  Do you think that schools should pay for a product if it’s built to solve problems and move the needle for Higher Ed?