Ning is the model Facebook should follow.. Seriously?

They have screwed their network creators over time and time again.

Well maybe Ning's execution of the model leaves much to be desired but what I wanted to express was the idea that a social network where the owner of the network paid for it is a good system because the provider of the service has to cater for the needs of the customer. And if the customer is a user and not an advertiser then I think the user should get better service.

And how does the owner of the social network get that money to pay Ning?

They exploit their users all they can.

I think you're focusing too much on Ning. What I am really referring to is the business model that it uses. As you've suggested it's imperfect and maybe Ning hasn't run their business very well but I don't think because of that we should say that another company cannot implement the model successfully.

The model I envision is very similar to the shared hosting model employed on the web. You sign up for hosting and you install a CMS like drupal or wordpress and you have yourself a community and you pay a subcription fee. But instead of drupal there could be a social networking application. Each network creator would be responsble for it's promotion and marketing but I think it's a viable model because there are existing real world communities that would like to establish an online presence and something like this may be a great way to do that.

With or without Ning, someone still has to pay the associated software/server/maintenance/bandwidth costs. You are not taking out the incentive to abuse peoples data to increase revenue with your model.

Funny you should say that, after the reocities project I was approached by a number of parties that were 'locked' in to ning without an export facility if I could please get their data out of the walled garden for them in a way that they could import it elsewhere.

See my reply here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1377750