OMG, I’ve been booted! Where’s my “Migrate from Ning” survival guide?
Friday, December 5th, 2008A lot of people seem to be pissed off about Ning shutting down adult sites. Sure, this is their service and they can do what they want with it. I just see red lights flashing all around the company (sorry for pun).
Ning started adopting cut-off-end-of-story policy in the recent time. The first precedent was when they shut down WidgetLaboratory. And plenty of Ning sites as a side-effect. WidgetLaboratory was as pissed off as they could and started crying foul. Ning didn’t seem to care. Michael Arrington called WidgetLaboratory idiots for posting private correspondence that didn’t support their case. I’m not in a position to judge who was right, there was a lot of heat about that. I suspect Ning to have been on a firmer ground but it all doesn’t matter. Only does the fact that a lot of social network sites went down – those using WidgetLaboratory widgets. It took 3 days to only hear something from Ning. Let alone putting sites back online. If you plan to turn off a misbehaving partner make sure your customers do not suffer or at least do not beg any word from you about why you sent them offline.
Now we have this – Ning will no longer support adult sites. Admitting the fact that they have no idea of monetizing adult sites they point you at the door. No assistance except for finding out about issues of exporting data. Let alone as-smooth-to-move-as-possible alternative solution.
Shutting down sites can make as much business sense as one can eat. I just don’t seem to like the idea that your community with all your time and effort investment can go down as a result of a brief business meeting in the host company with cut-em-off decision. They don’t know you, they don’t see how hard it is to gather like-minded people to build real conversations, so the decision comes easy. You’re no longer with them. As well as countless other sites. Ning can play monopolist and heavily moderate comments on blogs and forums while they see no real value in webmasters who made the service popular in the first place.
I liked one saying by somebody (if you know the source let me know I will link to it) about free hosted social network solutions (and Ning in particular): “In a perfect world it means that there’s someone else to care about software, updates, hosting and uptime. In the real world it means that your community is at the company’s mercy.” Speaking about Ning’s case I can’t agree more.
Maybe it’s time to take control for those webmasters who invest so much time in developing their communities. One answer is an affordable and independent managed community site solution from SkaDate. If you want control while not diving into technical distractions that’s the way to go.
On the other hand, WackWall is going to offer an interesting twist for retaining control. Being a free hosted social network service it’s going to offer to go independent with your original site and all your members, custom mods and template without any downtime whatsoever. I’m going to cover more details with soon-to-come WackWall 2.0 launch. Watch the news and good luck with your post-Ning roaming. Maybe it’s all for good.
