Regrettably, this probably means the end of Ning. It's the classic dot com business model. Once you engage in "community breaking" activities, like kicking of

Regrettably, this probably means the end of Ning. It's the classic dot com business model. Once you engage in "community breaking" activities, like kicking off your users or trying to force them into paying subscriptions, the amount of animosity and bad publicity generated by users who have invested a lot of time and energy into the service usually ends up killing the company. However, I'm not sure that this has wider repercussions for other social networking services. I assume that Facebook is making enough out of advertising to be sustainable (although I could be wrong).