I am always rooting for Ning.

From the very beginning Ning made things easy. People migrated to the platform for its ease of use and the sheer power it gave them to connect around an area of interest, issue or cause. Remember when Ning announced that it was phasing out “free” back in April?

I’ll admit that I was really worried that communities would die because of it, but chief executive Jason Rosenthal told Venturebeat, that Ning went from 15,000 to 70,000 paying customers since it got rid of its free product.He also said that Ning is gaining about 8,000 new subscribers each month.

Wow!

The purpose of this post is to share another bit of interesting news about Ning, which is this: Today the company released new tools that will allow people to easily (there’s that ease of use thing again…) incorporate a social experience into existing websites with the same drop and drag features of which users of its standalone communities have become so accustomed.

The goal was to make it easy enough for technophobes, as illustrated in this comment from Rosenthal, posted here“

“It used to be you’d have to hire a whole army of developers, but on Ning it is a drag-and-drop creation process so even someone with no technology skills can get all the features we expect to in a social experience online.”

Ning is also extending its platform to smartphones and an array of cloud services, including being able to integrate websites with Facebook or Twitter.

I appreciate the power that Ning brings to the little guy. Not everyone wants to put all of their eggs in the Facebook basket and this is one of the main reasons I will continue to root for Ning.