So, AOL wants to shut down or sell Bebo. No great surprise there. it did nobody any real favours and visually got stuck in the late 90s. And now, another social networking platform feels the strain of nobody paying for it and, likely, few using it.

Ning is/was a great experiment in micro social networking. So great that most of us couldnt really understand what it was for. Started by the man who created Netscape, Marc Andreesen, he obviously takes creating internet companies that become fragments of history as a hobby. Over at my favo(u)rite tech site Wired, they give the lowdown and make the point that I think many of us forget with the internet. Free is great and free gives us so many things but free doesn’t often last forever. What if you’ve invested time and effort in populating your free social network platform with photos, videos or other content and one day they decide to pull the plug? They can, you can’t stop them and what’s your fallback?

Backup folks! Whether it’s to another free service like Google Docs (remember there’s always the chance this could go too) or to one of the increasingly free portable hard disks you can by, remember your data is fragile and as less and less of it takes a real form you need to consider how you retain your life when all it exists as is a series of ones and zeros.