It’s very incomplete, as Ning offers easy exporting of user and profile data, but not of user-produced content. And really, you can’t blame them to a certain extent. Beyond the obvious financial incentive for not allowing an easy export, there are also the technical challenges of exporting to a format that will actually be useful. We aren’t even really at the point where we have universal export formats for the relatively mature medium of *blogs*, much less the younger and more complex beasts that are *social networks*. Until such standards are agreed up and implemented in a variety of platforms, the only way communities can ensure the exportability of their valuable content is to have the ability to do a direct dump of the database, and access to the skills required to translate it into another usable format.

It’s too bad that this is the case. The situation requires a pretty drastic trade-off between control and ease of use.