Periodic Fable

Sometimes I am accused of being a pessimist: I always treat technology, especially wonderful new inventions, services and applications, with a healthy pinch of salt.

So I laughed a bit hollowly to read that Ning are phasing out their free social networks (as well as reducing the number of their staff).

“We will phase out our free service.  Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning.” http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/ning-update

I have always been wary of Ning – like Second Life it is run by a single commercial company, and it has every right to do what it wishes with its customers who are getting something for nothing.  One early warning sign was when it cut off its API, which suddenly and without warning invalidated Ning networks and alienated developers who had been using it since the start. Ning is NOT open source. and it’s not really surprising that they now want to make money out of their service, which is easy to use even for the non-techie.

As Fabricio Zuardi, a former employee and developer, pointed out in the discussion thread on Ning Creators forum, “This is a risk everyone who builds anything in the cloud is subject to. Services come and goes, business models changes, APIs get updated and die, features get discontinued, even data-loss is part of the risk someone takes when you delegate the control of your stuff to a 3rd party company. The so called “cloud” is a very rough and unpredictable place, people should understand that.”

Ning has no backup facility, so the idea of “transitioning off” the service is laughable.  There is no way to export all the heaps of resources, discussions, videos, photos, audio files etc. that a network builds up over what by now could have been several years. Re-acquiring and moving as many resources as possible to re-open a network in a new system will be a huge job.

And once you’ve done that migration – which might temporarily solve your community hosting needs – what happens when it happens again, when the next free hosting website needs to start charging, or changes its system. Ultimately the lesson is not to rely on a single commercial source, especially if it’s free. I have known this for over 15 years. The platforms I started my first online communities and collaborative websites on are long gone.

In my next post I’ll look at some of the alternatives to Ning and how the Cohesion Model can be used to build a network or online community independent of any particular platform using resources and apps in the cloud.