Ning's Bubble Burst: No More Freebies!

**News Alert**

So it seems the new owner of Ning has decided to be a turd {yes, we said it, a turd!} by forcing its networks creators to pay up or ship out!

What does this mean?
It means that creators will no longer be able to host a free network by relying on the income earned from ads. They must now decide on whether to upgrade to a Premium service (at a cost designated by the level of service they choose) or move their network to another service provider which can be very daunting based on the amount of data that needs to be transferred.

In addition to this bit 'o news, the new CEO of Ning has decided to scale back the number of employees by over 40%. {Right, because jobs are soooo easy to find these days!}

One month after long-time Ning CEO Gina Bianchini was replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal, the company is making some major changes: It has just announced that it is killing off its free product, forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere. Rosenthal has also just announced that the company has cut nearly 70 people — over 40% of its staff.

As book bloggers, many of us rely on BookBlogs.Ning for our book news, to network our own blogs as well as to see what our fellow bloggers have going on. Tricia, creator of BookBlogs.Ning, has advised us that by May 4th, she'll learn more about how these changes will affect our beloved group. Depending on what options are available to her, we may all have to cough up some dough or we'll be rolling over to another service.

As you can tell by the tone of our post, we are NOT happy about this! We find it selfish that after having "raised around $120 million, getting valuations of a half-billion dollars in April 2008 and a reported $750 million last summer" it's still not enough and leaving quite a number of people unemployed makes it all that much worse!

Please click [HERE] to read the original article.