To understand this you need to know that back in 2005, Ning wasn't as restrictive a your-own-customized-social-network service as it is now, it allowed you to b

To understand this you need to know that back in 2005, Ning wasn't as restrictive a your-own-customized-social-network service as it is now, it allowed you to build several kinds of social, "web 2.0"-ish pages like hot-or-not type rating sites, restaurant review sites and social bookmarking sites. You could "clone" the sites others had created and you even had some level of access to the underlying PHP code. You can find references to that in old blog posts: http://blog.ning.com/2005/10/rate_my_anything.html http://blog.ning.com/2005/10/rate_my_anything.html It's these applications that according to the article Ning later turned off, after they had moved to a new model.