Readers are probably aware that Ning is closing its free services, including our own.

Ray Matthews writes that these NING issues should act as a wake up call to all of us:

“My reaction is that organizations, groups, schools, non-profits, and
governments need to take this as a wake-up call.

We need to reassess the position of SaaS and cloud computing services in
our business strategies.

We either need to either run the business critical services such as social
media communities on our own servers or operate these in environments that
we can control.

We also need to ensure that our content is maintained in an open standard
that can be migrated out of that environment to new platforms as the need
arises.

These two decisions are independent of whether or not the service is a
free or premium service.”