If you’re like me, you might be at a loss what to get your mom for Mother’s Day. This year, skip the flowers and cheesy greeting cards and instead find a great Ning community for her to join. Does she have a love for knitting or is she a compulsive runner? Addicted to coffee or a travel buff? There’s likely a Ning community out there just for her! With over 100 million people part of Ning communities today, she might already be a part of a Ning community and not even know it!

To find a Ning site for your mom, head to Google and type in the hobby or interest you’d like to find, and add “site:ning.com” to the end of the search. This will search content and topics from Ning communities. For instance, here’s a Google search result for skiing — each result is a Ning community. We also highlight a lot of great Ning sites through our blog, the Ning Resource Center, Customer Spotlight and Inspiration pages.

Better yet, if the Ning site she joins has social sign-in enabled, she’ll be able to use her social identity from services like Facebook, Yahoo!, Google and Windows Live to sign up and sign-in, meaning 1 less screen name or password for her to remember or write down.

Here are a few Ning communities Mom might like:

The arts
My Modern Metropolis
MyGraficO Arts & Crafts Community
The Crafter’s Cafe – A place for women to come together, support one another, and build friendships
crafthaus – PARTICIPATORY SPORT FOR CRAFT ARTISTS
Knitting Community
The Peachy Keen Connection
The Cookery Network – The place for passionate cooks

Travel
The Hive

Celebrity
Smart Girls at the Party – CHANGE THE WORLD BY BEING YOURSELF
moonfrye

Causes
Navy For Moms
Women on the Road to Rio20

Working moms & mompreneurs
Professional Leaders of Women and Girls – Providing Quality Products, Services, and Support
Role Mommy
Pregnant Bloggers Club – Where pregnant bloggers converge
Executive Moms
Women Advisors Forum

Local communities
Chippewa Valley Moms – A Local Resource For Moms
ParentingNH – Events, features and things to do for families in NH
santarosamom – Conversation, ideas and events for parents in Santa Rosa and Sonoma County
Spartanburg Moms – A gathering place for moms in Upstate South Carolina
Des Moines Families – The 411 on 515.

Health & family
Babble Playground
National Movement for America’s Children – The Time to Awaken is Now.

Why else would you want to find a community for your mom? Hint, it benefits you…

It wasn’t so long ago that Facebook was only available to college students. But how times have changed. If you’ve tempted online fate by accepting a Facebook friend request from your parents, you know the online run-ins that can inevitably happen. Choice examples include awkward comments made by your dad for a party photo posted by your friends, or that check-in you didn’t get the chance to de-tag before your mom wondered what you were doing out at 4 AM. Find your mom a Ning site that’ll excite and get her engaged, and you might find a bit of refuge for your Facebook account.

Does your mom want a place to share family photos or does she have friends that share the same hobbies as her but aren’t sharing with each other online? Take her Mother’s Day gift 1 step further and create a Ning community for her! This is a great way to connect your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends. All in a safe and private place, too.

Better yet, make her an admin of the community so she can take ownership and pride in keeping family and friends together through her Ning site.

Happy Mothers Day, Mom!

Today, we’re rolling out a new Ning plan for customers who need extra special treatment: the Ning VIP plan.

Ning has become known as a flexible, powerful social platform. Within minutes, anyone can create an online community that’s completely custom. A wide range of individuals, organizations and companies depend on Ning to bring people together – right down to the smallest groups that may only have a few dozen members.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen Ning Creators take the platform to a whole new level. Many successful communities with big audiences are generating significant revenue. Others use Ning as a co-publishing platform to fuel social conversations for their brand and products. These customers are demanding more from Ning. They need to be confident that their network won’t go down. And, if something serious does happen, they need to know Ning will respond quickly, even at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning. They need an account manager who understands their objectives, the progress they’ve made with their network and the challenges they face – someone who can provide a high level of service and advice. They also need deeper metrics to understand how members are interacting on their network and sharing content on the social web.  And, they need professional design services so they can launch a community that communicates their brand and values.

We frequently receive inquiries for this higher level of service and premium SLA (service level agreement) from prospective customers as well. Up until now, we haven’t offered a subscription plan or a dedicated team who can address these needs. In several cases, we’ve negotiated a special deal and tasked a number of internal support and engineering resources to deliver this special treatment. With others, the customer either purchased a Ning Pro subscription or we lost out on their business.

Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of the Ning VIP Plan:

• Guaranteed uptime
• Point-in-time recovery back-ups
• 24/7 IT support for urgent issues
• A dedicated account manager
• Monthly social engagement reporting
• Launch consultation and training
• Professional design and development
• 1 Terabyte of storage and 10 Terabytes per month of bandwidth

Due to the location and time zone of our VIP account managers, we can initially only deliver the VIP Plan to customers in the U.S., Canada and Germany. If you’re interested in the new Ning VIP plan, please give us a call at 1-866-992-0971 (U.S. and Canada) or 0800-101-4903 (Germany).

On April 12th, we received confidential details of a security vulnerability that could allow someone to sign in as an arbitrary Ning user. The intent was not malicious, and to our knowledge and reasonable belief, there has been no unauthorized access to user accounts. The Ning engineering team immediately took several steps: We changed the encryption information to generate a sign-in cookie, and we changed where the information was stored. In addition, we proactively strengthened the encryption algorithm. The changes were then immediately rolled out across the Ning platform starting late last week. Ning Creators and their members may have noticed the protective measures when we forced all users to sign-in again. At this time, we are confident that we have addressed the vulnerability.

We would like to thank the team that identified the vulnerability and collaborated with us to fix it. We take privacy and security very seriously at Ning. We would again like to emphasize that due to the confidential way we were approached, no user accounts have been maliciously compromised.

As a company based in the heart of the tech industry in California, it can be easy to lose sight of how Ning as a product is used worldwide. We recently announced Ning’s official launch in Germany, and with 100,000 Ning communities, and a new community created every 10 minutes, we wanted to take a step back and do a round-up of Ning communities from around the world we think are stellar:

We also highlight some amazing communities on the Ning homepage for our various markets:

Germany (Deutsch)
United Kingdom (English)
Canada (English)
France (Français)
Brazil (Português)

Have a Ning community that should be on our list? Let us know about it!

Last year, we did something a little different than we have in previous years; we published a public Product Roadmap. It was a big success. It bolstered direct customer-company communication, and it really helped Ning Creators know what was coming next.

It was an ambitious roadmap, and by year’s end we had finished all but one of the projects we initially listed on the roadmap (we’re still working on Mobile improvements; it expanded in scope and became larger). All told, we completed many more projects in 2011 than we did in the 2 previous years combined. In fact, we actually added additional projects to the 2011 Roadmap as the year went along, making it our biggest year of improvements ever. All of those additional projects were based directly on the suggestions we received from our customers — thank you!

We’re going to keep up regular roadmap updates for 2012, although this year we’re going to do things a little differently. We’re still going to keep you updated about what we’re working on with our Product Roadmap page on Creators, but we’re going to shift to offering a more “living” document that shows:

1. What’s already in partial release
2. What we’re working on now that’s not yet released
3. What’s still in the planning stages

The goal is to update it frequently as we go along instead of offering one giant laundry list of features. We want the projects we’re reporting on to be focused on high quality — incorporating feedback we hear from our customers so we can be nimble and adjust what we’re building based on your valuable input. And, we’ll be adding to our roadmap as we complete projects throughout the year.

With all of that said, here’s what we have partially released, are working on, and are still planning…

Partially Released

Activity Feed: If you haven’t seen it yet, we also recently added “Top News” as a beta in the Ning Labs section of your Dashboard. Among other things, this feed pulls in Facebook and Twitter account posts into the Top News activity feed. We’ll be making additional visual improvements to this feed, implementing some real-time abilities for new activity items, and moving this feature out of beta. Check out the latest set of improvements we recently released. There’s more to come on this project that will help increase engagement on your Ning Network.

Member Categories & Badges: We know a lot of Ning Creators want to create different levels of membership for their community. We’ll be adding the ability for you to assign members to custom-made categories. The work on this project kicked off a few weeks ago with a reorganization of the member roles and moderation data to make finding and filtering members easier. Next, we’ll roll out the ability to create and administer categories in this area. This project will also include a way for you to create custom badges using these new member categories. This will be an excellent way for you to reward or identify admins, featured members, special people and all-stars on your community.

Working On It

Mobile Update: Not everyone is aware that there’s a mobile version of every Ning Network — it’s located at networkname.ning.com/m. If you are aware of it, you’ll be very happy to hear that we’re working on a redesign of this mobile interface that will be a giant improvement. This is one of the largest projects we’ve undertaken to date, and it’s really important. We want to get it right so that Ning Creators won’t just have a better mobile experience to offer their members, but will have a way to configure and customize the mobile version to really fit their community. We’ll be posting about this on Ning Creators and accepting volunteers for the beta group.

Help Center Redesign: Our Advocacy team is most excited about their revamp of the Help Center. It’s time for a refresh of the content, the look, the advice — all of it is currently in the process of being redone to be more friendly. Let us know if there are specific resources you’d like to see in our updated Help Center.

Planning it

Blog Update: The blog functionality on Ning Networks is ready for a redo. We’ve gotten a wealth of feedback from Ning Creators about what they’d like to see done differently with the blog feature. We have a lot of work planned to make the blog more powerful and much more visually appealing. We’ll share more details as this project unfolds.

Sign-Up Controls: We’ll offer expanded control over sign in and sign up options that will allow you to, for example, have an “open registration” during specific times and “closed registration” at other times. If you’re more interested in using Ning as a publishing platform over a community platform, you will be able to turn off all “Sign-Up” links and messaging visible to non-signed-in visitors.

New Commenting Options: Provide the ability to allow non-members to join in the conversation by using third-party commenting services (e.g., Facebook comments).

How we move forward

One thing we want to do is invest more resources in beta testing and iterating on the design of each new feature — very similar to what we did with the recently updated Chat. We started the complete Chat revamp with an early announcement about the feature, followed by the creation of a small test group, gradually opened up the beta to more people, announced our progress ahead of final deployment, and then rolled the feature out to everyone. It was one of our most successful product launches, and it incorporated a lot of opportunity for the most engaged Ning Creators to provide feedback. Being laser-focused on one project at a time (rather than being more generally focused on a giant list of projects) helped us make Chat even better than we had originally planned. We’d like to pattern more of our releases in a similar way.

We still plan to innovate in a big way, and, as always, there is additional work going on that’s not reflected in this product roadmap. For example, it may not be apparent that over the past year we greatly expanded language support for our marketing pages (Ning traverse le monde! FYI: We’ll be re-translating French and German soon), reorganized and consolidated domains, adopted new behind-the-scenes web services that make things run more smoothly, and many other projects. We continue to grow and become stronger as a platform when we do these types of essential, less visible projects. Building out all facets of our business — and not just the forward-facing product features — means a more reliable and robust product.

We’ll be continuing the conversation on Ning Creators and the Ning Blog about these projects, so look for ongoing announcements about beta access and updates on our progress. If you didn’t find your favorite request in this update, we’ll be updating the roadmap regularly with new items. As always, thank you for all of the suggestions and feedback!

We’re writing as a company today to express our concerns with a couple legislative bills currently being debated in Congress (the “Protect IP Act” and the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA). Much has been written, many have opposed, but the beat goes on. We think this kind of legislation is a big deal that doesn’t come around often. Here’s why:

As background, these bills would give the US government and private individuals additional enforcement tools to combat websites that may be engaged in copyright infringement or counterfeiting. The goal is clearly well meaning—online infringement is a serious issue that demands serious enforcement. As with many things, however, the devil is in how the goal will be accomplished. In summary, court orders can be sought against any website (wherever located) that is believed to be engaging in online infringement. If an order issues, payment providers and advertising networks can be barred from doing business with the site, search engines must stop returning results for the site and domain name servers would need to blacklist access to the site’s domain name.

Even after Congressional revision last month, the current bills remain extremely broad. Legitimate websites can be put on an “American blacklist” without warning or an opportunity to defend themselves (whether that blacklist would even be effective at stopping traffic to an offending site is a whole other issue). A single complaint could trigger a blacklist, with the burden of proof on that website to get itself unblocked. This could lead to unprecedented monitoring of websites, subject to individual judgment (read: censorship). Here at Ning, we don’t think our Network Creators should be subjected to that kind of policy.

This would be a radical restructuring of Internet law. Oodles of unproductive and time-consuming litigation would arise to challenge and interpret the bills. We think it’s necessary to have a careful, broad-based debate on more targeted and effective measures for combating online IP infringement.

Here’s what you can do: Learn more, join the fight. Contact your Representative or Senator and tell them to oppose these bills. These bills are being debated again when Congress returns to session in late January. Or just use the power of social media—you can make a difference.

I’m excited to announce that we have completed our merger with Glam. As of today, Ning is officially part of the Glam Media family!

We’ve release more than 35 major new features in the last year alone, and we have some major enhancements in the works — including an all-new Chat and continued updates to the popular Activity Feed. We’re hard at work on a bunch of new features that we’ll share with you in an updated product roadmap blog post later this month. If you’re a Network Creator who is interested in becoming part of the Glam Media Network, you can find out more about how to apply for that here. For all of our customers who have been following our progress from milestone to milestone, you can expect your Ning service to continue unchanged — and you can continue to expect us to build out exciting new features to help you get the most out of your Ning Network.

You can read the press release here.

As people in the United States prepare to spend time with their families for Thanksgiving, Mogwee is here to help coordinate the hustle and bustle. Here are a few ways to make good use of Mogwee this week:

• Make a family Hangout to coordinate plans, share shopping lists and post real-time photos with relatives that can’t make it to the feast.
• Picking people up? Make things easier with the “Share a Location” feature.
• Can’t decide what side dishes to serve? Make a quick poll to settle things.
• Get everyone in the spirit by sharing some classic Thanksgiving-themed YouTube videos. Here’s one to get you started.

Mogwee is free, and you can get started in seconds using your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Android device or the Web. Have a great holiday!

Last week, Ning was mentioned in Marty Weintraub’s Search Engine Land article, Content Marketing Essentials: Tactical Advice From A To Z. His post highlights ways marketers and businesses can develop a strategy through crafting quality written and creative content for their presence online, further building their brand. Interestingly, many of the steps Marty highlights appeal to the greater audience of Ning’s community organizers and those looking to weave social conversations in their content and inspire action online.

While Marty buckets Ning alongside blogging services like WordPress, he differentiates Ning as a platform underpinning the social endeavors many businesses, organizations and people aspire to establish and support within their website.

The Ning Platform enables communities to easily form and blossom online, allowing the conversation to grow organically by attracting people to the things they care most about; we see many examples underlining the various conversations and connections happening through Ning. For instance, seeking advice about how to cope with a diabetes diagnosis? The Ning Network TuDiabetes provides the outlet and a safe place to share your story and learn from others. Conversely, teeming with excitement over the movie premier of Twilight Breaking Dawn and looking for exclusive interviews with Twilight cast members? The Twilight Saga is the Ning community to hear the latest gossip or post your predictions for the final movie.

What’s happening on your Ning Network or how you are contributing to communities you’ve joined?

We’re excited to announce a series of feature updates and improvements to Mogwee, Ning’s free mobile communication and collaboration service available for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android and Web. Mogwee is a fun way to easily create “Hangouts” and stay connected with friends, family, co-workers, study groups and more, no matter where you are.

Join in seconds, easily invite friends, express yourself with a custom theme, then start enjoying our features. Some highlights:

Joining and Inviting

• Join Mogwee effortlessly using your Facebook account
• Easily invite lots of friends at once using Facebook, SMS or email

Interface

• Enjoy an improved interface, including the ability to choose custom themes
• Follow conversations more easily with threaded replies (just tap on a message to reply directly)
• On an iPad? Enjoy an updated iPad-specific interface

Features

• Share real-time photos from events
• Share your location (or any location) with a Hangout (iOS and Android)
• Get Hangout feedback on any topic with easy-to-create polls
• Browse and search YouTube directly within Mogwee to share videos with the Hangout (iOS and Android)
• Send fun animated gifts and actions, including sharks, crickets and Kung Fu squirrels
• Find out the answer to an all-important question: who is the Hangout’s Sheep Tennis champion?

Get started by downloading Mogwee for iOS or Mogwee for Android. Don’t have one of those devices, or want to use Mogwee on your computer? Hit up Mogwee for Web.

Enjoy, and please feel free to visit the Mogwee Blog for more information, or find us on Twitter and Facebook.