We decided to set up brand new WackWall blog and separate it from this one. Multiple blogs are harder to manage but they make ordinary user’s life easier. Guess what we choose?
It’s not completely ready yet so we will make some tweaking but from now on all info about the ongoing WackWall/Xitti updates will be posted there.
Find it here: blog.WackWall.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.
I’ve been thinking about the situation with Ning shutting down adult social networks on its platform.
The problem with free hosted services for social networks is the same with Ning. It’s only a matter of time when your interests go against theirs – monetary, ideological, or whatever else. At least nobody owes you anything – it’s free, what the hell. Nobody approaches your individual problems – this is one reason you can find yourself moving to another place again.
I believe this time people will be more careful with choosing provider for their community sites. One ground rule here is not to change one “walled garden” (a closed place where your community depends on business decisions that the service owners make) for another. Sure, Ning claims that you can get a running copy of your site with your members and data but Ning proved that not to be the case. Currently they have problems with even meaningfully exporting your data. If they had any success with that no adult communities would be seeking new providers now.
Exporting members to another place is evil – you don’t know who many members will survive it. You need to get them to actually respond to your newsletter by moving their activity to the new site, you need to have them get used to changes which every provider has. How many members are you going to lose? 50%? 80%?
1) If you do not see too much value in time invested in growing your community – you can move on and find one of services similar to Ning.
2) If you want control and guarantees you need to bear with the thought that it costs money. A solution like SkaDate might be the choice, given that it has a no-brainer hosted social network site solution. This is freedom. At any point you can opt out for an independent set up, so this is where you stop moving your community between providers.
3) If you want both free and control that’s where you choose WackWall. Solving the problem of free hosted solution and independence is one of the major reasons we are introducing WackWall 2.0 relaunch soon. I will follow up on this specific topic later.
This time the choice should be made by you – not your platform provider. Time and effort to grow a community is your main resource, I believe it should be put on top of your priority list before you start digging again.
Good luck with that.
