And here is the full-text of it and why I think his arguments are fundamentally flawed and borderline stupid, perhaps arguably communistic. Decide for yourself, however:
Many years ago, when the Internet was pretty new, my wife Carolyn entrusted a couple hundred precious personal photographs to an online sharing service whose name we can no longer remember. Unfortunately, she, in her naivete, did not keep local copies of her photos. Mass storage was relatively expensive and she felt like she had put her photos into the hands of a professional service. What could go wrong?
That's the problem. Your wife's naiveté was to assume her free photo site also doubled as a backup solution. You want to keep your data safe? You have to keep it yourself or replicate it in more than one place (i.e. not just in a single online site, paid OR free). Your wife is complaining about how she didn't receive a free backup solution from a company that wasn't even providing such a solution.
At some point, she went to log in to show someone her photos and she got a 404 error. The site was gone. Dead. No indication of what had happened to it. No warning. Despite my considerable tech prowess and good contacts, I was unable to identify any way to recover her vanished photos. And since the service was free, it's not clear they'd have had any legal obligation to help anyway (though they clearly had a moral obligation to do so). She has understandably never trusted another free service. She isn't even comfortable using Google Docs or Google Calendar.
Right, no indication, no warning, just gone. This can happen, especially if a company goes out of business or gets mis-managed. Entire countries sometimes get massacred from being mis-managed (go check out Iceland's entire financial structure, for example). No way to recover the the files? The service was offered for free? Then the service already paid for itself and doesn't really owe you anything, even morally. They didn't sell themselves as being reliable, or being around forever, or even, unfortunately as a backup service. Once again, that was the main issue here, not the fact that you couldn't get your files back. Who would even expect you should legally (or morally) get them back? It takes cost and effort to provide that recovery, obviously of which that company simply ran out of both. If they've run out of both money and all of their free volunteer time, then it's reasonable to expect that you're not going to get didly-squat back. How about instead of bitching, send them a Thank You card for the service they actually DID provide you and your wife for whatever considerable amount of time they did.
What do you suppose would happen today if, say, Twitter or FaceBook or
MySpace or LInkedIn suddenly announced the end of their free services.
If you want to keep your stuff, you have to pay up for a fee-based
membership. Even assuming they gave us a way to export our stuff so we
wouldn't lose it, the hue and cry would be deafening.
Well, lots of people would just get off the site. Hopefully, they aren't too big of woe-is-me type people and have backups of their photos (or at least the ones they care about) so that if Facebook/Twitter did start charging, they aren't without any kind of leverage. This is the big, scary world and people actually do live in "real-life" despite what people's MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter profiles might paint a picture of fantasy they have in their heads. Protect yourself.
Well, that's essentially what Ning Networks just did. With a reported
2.3 million social networkers hosting their sites on Ning's services,
the company has announced it is pulling the plug on free services --
except, apparently, those set up by teachers for their students' use
-- this summer. Everyone has to start paying a monthly fee that will
likely be a minimum of $35 or move their network to a different
service. As wired.com said, "Once again — see Tripod, Imeem, etc. —
users of a web service have had the rules switched on them once they
began relying on a service. That’s why it’s important to choose web
services that offer an easy way to grab your stuff and split — a
feature commonly known as 'data portability.'" I agree but I think
Wired.com is letting folks off the hook too easily. Of what value to
anyone is the collection of their Facebook or Twitter posts absent the
network of people to whom it was addressed and with whom it was
shared? It's not about data, it's about relationships and investments
of time and psyche.
Ning was awfully nice to offer free services for even as long as they did. People should laud them for their efforts in doing so. They've clearly provided as much, if not more, value to their free users than their free users have provided back in terms of free word-of-mouth marketing, identifying bugs and issues, and so on. Let's not be one-sided either: If it's greed you're after, the users using the free service are also greedy and certainly motivated by their greed to report bugs and issues since they want to keep sucking the free blood they're already getting (and keep getting). Most of them are simply not saying good things and reporting issues to Ning out of the goodness of their altruistic hearts. Maybe Dan is just a really, really nice guy.
So Ning can't figure out how to monetize free social networking -- at
least at a high enough level to satisfy investors -- and consumers end
up grabbing the short end of a messy stick. This is abysmal behavior
on Ning's part. I don't care if their rules allowed it and they
forewarned everyone. It's a stinky way to do business and blackens the
eyes of all involved, including, unfortunately, one of the Net's
really Good Guys, Marc Andreessen. The company says it is facing a $4
billion opportunity, which makes it even slimier to abandon their free
users, the ones who helped them debug, popularize and extend the
platform on which a few people will now become wealthy. If the
opportunity is that huge -- and it might well be -- why couldn't the
company keep the free networks around and toss them a few grains of
rice now and then? Why was a total shut-down necessary? There's really
only one answer: greed.
Whether Ning can figure out how to monetize its service or not, who the hell cares? It's not your problem to solve. And who is to say it's to satisfy their investors? Perhaps they aren't even making enough just to break even (as most venture-funded startups basically burn through cash on losses).
Consumers are not grabbing the short end of the stick. They've received incredibly valuable free services, apparently too much value because it costs more to provide it then the users are giving back to Ning (which is a big fat $0). Users should be glad to receive the free services they did. After all, it was built with real money, even if it was provided from "greedy" venture capitalists.
Once again, if you have services and data you find valuable and are worried about losing by storing them with any 3rd party, paid or free, then perhaps you should be looking into doing personal backups.
Maybe it's time for the FCC and/or FTC and/or other agencies to look
at providing some form of cushion or insurance for free consumer
services so that the little guy doesn't get stuck holding the smelly
bag of crap left behind by the greed mongers yet again.
No. Maybe it's not time the FCC or FTC looked into this issue. If anything, you might as well just say goodbye completely to Free services except for a tiny small handful. Business owners should retain the freedom to change Free plans, at their will, and perhaps even with or without notice, regardless of any implied moral obligation.
The irony here is you're writing this all on a Posterous blog (as am I), for which neither you nor I paid a single dime to use. And you know what? If I don't like Posterous, I can't even apply for a refund. I have to pack up and leave. And what if Posterous just folded up shop tomorrow because they too ran out of venture money and couldn't find a way to get acquired or reach profitability? Guess what, that's just too bad. It's also known as Real Life.
In any case, this sucks.
Quit bitching. Maybe consider first doing some personal backups and shell out some dollars for services you actually consume. At least that way, they're less likely to fold up shop abruptly. Or better yet, if you had a Ning network and it provided real value to you (not just the imaginary "Free" value), shut the hell up and pay for it.
Comments (2)
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply. I appreciate your insights even where I disagree with them. We clearly have different socio-economic views here and that , as they say, is what makes a circus.
I do not disagree with you at all that people ought to keep backups of the files they upload to the Cloud and not expect storage services and the like to offer some sort of insurance, certainly not if the service itself is free.
HOWEVER, there is a lot more going on here than you seem to be willing to acknowledge.
First, even if I could and did, e.g., copy all of my Facebook posts to a locally maintained file, of what value are most of them outside the context of the FB network? I'd submit they're largely unhelpful stand-alone (though not always or all of them).
Second, in the case of Ning, they did make an at least implied promise that they would always be free. They never openly disagreed with anyone who suggested that on their behalf, nor did they post anything prominent indicating that everyone was on their own. Indeed, if free services like Ning and FB posted their disavowal of all responsibility prominently on their sites (not buried in legal disclaimers nobody reads), few if any of them would reach the critical mass that would enable them to obtain financing.
Third, you asked how I knew this decision by Ning was to satisfy investors. The company said so in their announcement.
Finally, I'm not bitching. I am raising a general issue I think those of us who claim to be Internet "experts" of some sort ought to be discussing in the interest both of fair play and in helping to shape the direction of the Internet which, being a relatively lawless place, relies on the "kindness of strangers" to keep things more or less healthy and friendly.
I do not advocate government regulation; rather, I raise it as an idea to stimulate discussion on the topic. Interestingly, of all the posts my note has generated today, not one has yet suggested a better way of dealing with the problem. Rather, all of them don't see this as a problem or at least not one worth solving.
Fine. We can disagree about that. I think Ning's decision was ill-advised, completely unnecessary and will give the Net a black eye with respect to free services that it will take a long time to recover. And I think that ultimately hurts all of us who love the Web.
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