Why open source crowd should stop crowing about Ning’s problems
Last week, the biggest social media service most people have never heard of came out with a startling announcement. Ning, which allows you to build your own social networking site, was going to end its free service and focus on its paying customers.
The news was broken last week by Techcrunch which snagged a copy of CEO Jason Rosenthal’s memo to employees about the big change:
“When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success. My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business.”
Rosenthal has just replaced Gina Bianchini as CEO. She co-founded Ning with Mark Andreessen. The company confirmed the change in a blog post the next day:
“As many of you know, we made a decision yesterday to focus 100% of the company on enhancing the features and services we offer to paying Ning Creators. The tens of thousands of you who already use our paid service represent over 75% of our traffic, and we’ve heard repeatedly from you ways that we can deliver a killer service to help make your Ning Network more effective.”
This announcement touched off a wave of panic among users of Ning, particularly educators and non-profits. But it also set off a round of smug “I-told-you-so” posts from developers who didn’t like Ning because it was a closed, proprietary system. They had long been warning people of the risks of putting so much content and resources into a service run by an unprofitable company with no sense of what might happen to all of that information should the company go kaput.
But the reality is not so simple. And while I’m generally a fan of open source and the open Web, I also became a big fan of Ning. And I think in that seeming contradiction, there’s a lesson for people who are building Web services and tools that they want regular folks to use.
So let me talk about my experience and what I plan to do with my network going forward.
Almost three years ago, I received a grant from the Knight Foundation as part of their News Challenge program. The grant was to research and design the newsroom of the future on behalf of The Chronicle, the Duke University student newspaper. I dubbed the work, The Next Newsroom Project.
As part of the grant, I planned to build a project site to post my research and data, and create a discussion around it. So I wanted something more than a blog, something with community features that would allow for conversations and connections. At the time, several folks said I should build it using Drupal, an open source content management system.
That sounded good to me. I was down with open source. And everyone said the same thing about Drupal: It’s easy. It’s right out of the box. That, I learned, was not the case. I had a Web company volunteer to build the site in Drupal, but five months later, what I had was lame, buggy, site that was difficult to use and manage, and impossible for folks who were joining to figure out.
I spent a lot of hours trying to give myself a crash course in Drupal to fix things. I know a healthy amount of HTML, and assumed I could figure this out. But I couldn’t. And the clock was ticking on my one-year project. Finally, I began calling around, trying to hire someone to fix it. But the cost for basic fixes would have exceeded the grant.
At this point, I could have just chucked it and started a Wordpress blog. But I still wanted the social features, which at that point just weren’t available on the Wordpress platform back then. (As an aside, let me say otherwise that Wordpress is by far my favorite blogging platform.)
Some people were suggesting services like KickApps, which provided tools to build your own social networking site. But I played with KickApps and still found it way too complicated. I was in no mood to sit through tutorials and spend days piecing together the elements I needed.
It was about this time, in the Fall of 2007, that someone suggested I try Ning. I fell in love right away. I registered for an account and launched my network in five minutes. Five minutes! In less than an hour, I had customized the colors and uploaded the logo a friend had designed. I re-sent an invite to folks who had joined the old network, and in just a couple days I had 200 members.
Sure, there were some limitations on features. I’ve always wanted better editing features for blog posts. But overall, it was so simple to use, and so easy for members to figure out, that I immediately became a Ning evangelist.
Yes, I understood the risks. But I figured Ning would be around at least the couple years I needed to do the project. And if it did collapse, well, I was keeping duplicates of as much info as I could on my PC.
So now the day of reckoning is here. I’m at peace with that. For awhile, I was a premium user, paying $19.95 per month to have the ads shut off. But I dropped that when the grant ended. I still pay $5 per month to use my own URL. I’ll have to wait until Ning offers more details to see whether it’s worth keeping my Ning account. I’d probably pay a bit more than $5 per month, but I wouldn’t pay $19.95 per month.
In the meantime, I’m seeing lots of folks offer to migrate users from Ning to their services. There’s a list of a few here via ReadWriteWeb and here via Techcrunch.
I plan to check them out. I’ll probably start with BuddyPress just because I’m pretty comfortable doing Wordpress installs at this point. However, many of them are claiming to be easy to use and “out of the box” simple. I’m skeptical. I hope I’m wrong. But we’ll see. It’s just that I’ve heard that before, and usually its coming from the perspective of developers and engineers.
When I heard the Ning news, and the ensuing snark, I recalled a post by J.D. Lasica a couple of years ago calling for a “Community Media Toolset.” Lasica wrote:
“The good news is that there are now hundreds of free, open source content management systems to run your publication or social network on. Some of the more popular ones include Drupal, Plone/Zope, Joomla, Ruby on Rails, Scoop, Mambo, Midgard, Typo3 and many others (though the openness of their platform is a matter of degree).
The bad news is that, out of the box, these platforms were created by coders with only a passing acquaintance with the English language.”
He’s right. In most cases, these community of developers don’t really have the perspective of the typical users who want something simple, rather than loaded with features designed to impress other developers. The average person wants something intuitive. Apple recognizes this, and that’s the genius of their designs. We don’t want to read instructions. We just want the thing to work.
Folks developing these open-source projects need to be working much more closely with designers to simplify their work if they want it to reach a wider audience. That was just one of many things Ning did right. (Here’s Five (more) things Ning did right via FastCompany.)
It’s a shame this vision didn’t translate into a sustainable business model for Ning. I’m still rooting for them and hope they succeed with this transition. But in the meantime, those cheering this failure are missing the larger story about what it takes to build a service that attracts millions of mainstream users.
If open source developers don’t embrace that lesson, they risk limiting the potential reach and value of the platforms they’re developing.
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Happy to be a reference point if you have BuddyPress questions, and excited to hear what you think about it.
I couldn’t agree more. The open sources are now smugly telling Ning creators “We told you so!” - but in reality they don’t have their own act together and are not in any position to pontificate on this subject. I was one of the people who heeded their advice (”Whatever you do, don’t build your social network on Ning, because you’ll be keft high and dry if they go out of business”). Instead, I bought into Social Engine, which was highly recommended on websites dealing with this subject.
What a disaster!
First, there were endless glitches. I have only basic html skills, so I paid SN to install the software for me; but even so, there was one glitch after another.
SN’s technical support wasn’t exactly friendly or responsive. Yes, they were friendly and responsive *before* I bought their product, but not so helpful afterwards.
But the real problem came when I began to add the Apps (which had to be bought separately, of course). Most of them didn’t work, or didn’t work properly (even though, again, I had paid the developers who’d created them to install them for me).
When I complained to SN’s “support” about the developers’ failure to respond to my emails, they told me that while they were happy to recommend third party developers and incorporate their links into the SN website, they took no responsibility for the work they did or did not do, or for the Apps they installed.
But without the Apps there is no network.
And then there were the “upgrades”, both of the SN software itself and of individual Apps. The App upgrades, it turned out, would only work on the latest version of SN - which meant that, every time I wanted to add a new App, I would have to install the latest version of the SN software itself. O was prepared - not happy, but willing - to go along with this, but I didn’t have the technical know-how to do it myself. Could SN technical support do it for a fee? No, they didn’t offer this service. They suggested contacting a developer. Easier said than done. The developers simply didn’t respond to emails. Or, if they did, and if they carried out the work requested (for a fee, of course), they didn’t respond to emails when there were problems and glitches arising from that work (which there nearly always were).
One of the things I needed to have done was to have a toggle button installed so that members could switch between two languages (English and Spanish). SN had assured me, before I bought their software, that this would not be a problem. Hah! It wasn’t a problem - it was a nightmare. First of all it transpipred that the software they’d sold me didn’t, in fact, support this feature. I would have to upgrade to the latest version for that (this was just a few weeks after tey’d installed the software for me). THEN it turned out that they didn’t actually have any language packs, only English. I could add a second language, but I’d have to get the pack written myself. Which I did, by paying a translation company (cost $500).
When the language pack was ready I asked them if they could install it for me and create a language toggle button. No, they didn’t offer that service, but, once again, they could recommend a developer who could do it for me, for a fee. In fact they recommended three developers who were “intimately familiar” with the SN software.
The first offered to do this work for $200, but a week later emailed me to say that he wouldn’t, in fact, be able to do it. Could I have my $50 deposit back? Of course, he said. But ge never sent it.
The second developer said he was “far too busy” at the moment, and suggested that I contact him “at a later date”. Yeah, sure.
The third offered to install the language pack and toggle button for $2,000.
I said no thanks.
In the end I figured out how to install it myself. The installation took me about 15 minutes.
And that - to cut a long story short - is why I eventually moved to Ning. I lost more than half of my members in the move, but the SN site was a complete nightmare - and an expensive one, at that. I wouyld estimate that it cost me at least $5,000 in the few months that I tried to run it. Now it’s sitting there, abandoned.
So when I read these ” I told you so” posts and blogs etc., from developers and open source “enthusiasts” it really annoys me. Maybe if they were a bit more professional themselves we wouldn’t have to rely so much on companies like Ning.
Chris, great post. Really thoughtful.I,too, am a big fan of open-source, but a bigger fan of “please let a code dummy like me be able to make this work.”
Gary Kebbel
Journalism Program Director
Knight Foundation
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with Drupal. Drupal is an extremely powerful, but extremely raw system. It takes a talented implementer to really make Drupal sing. It is NOT in any way an “out of the box” solution. Whoever told you that was either ignorant or simply lying.
Unfortunately much of the time when you focus on “user friendly”, you make trade-offs in functionality. Like you mentioned with Ning - it was missing lots of features you’d like, but it was so easy to use you let it slide. That’s the important point here - it’s easy to use because it’s limited. This is much of the same reason Apple products are so regarded as easy to use because the design of them is simple and the functionality is intentionally limited.
Drupal is the exact opposite of this. It makes zero assumptions about what you’re going to build, what kind of content you’re going to manage or how. It really is the Linux of CMSes for better or worse. This is why it’s admittedly cryptic and developer focused. It can’t enforce a strong set of intuitive metaphors when it had no idea what the end result will be.
Wordpress is a blogging platform. It has made very strong UI metaphors around the act of publishing a blog and it’s easily the best blogging platfom available. The trade-off is that it’s not very good at doing anything else. Developers have valiantly tried to hang other functionality off Wordpress, but you’ll quickly come to realize that those alternate functions very heavily clash with Wordpress’s blog-tailored workflows. You end up with admin panels off in their own world, re-inventing the wheel, and lacking cross-compatibility with other plug-ins because Wordpress lacks the fundamental plumbing to manage, say, a community. Wordpress was designed to manage a blog.
Something like BuddyPress was tacked onto Wordpress because Wordpress is popular, and people want to use Wordpress. BuddyPress wasn’t build on Wordpress because Wordpress is a great community platform. BuddyPress essentially rewrote Wordpress to achieve BuddyPress.
Now, don’t interpret this comment as an endorsement of Drupal or a knock against the quality of BuddyPress - that isn’t my intent. I just wanted to offer some insight into some of these systems and why they work the way they do.
Good luck with your project.
I was one of the network owners bitten by Ning’s recent announcement. In the course of doing research on alternatives since then, I’ve come to the same conclusion you have: all the open source solutions, appealing as they might be for being free and open, they’re written for coders and developers.
I’m an amateur when it comes to web applications, but I can install Wordpress and PHPBB easily enough. Even so, I’m confounded trying to figure out what’s wrong with the installation of something like Dolphin or AstroSpaces.
@James: “BuddyPress essentially rewrote Wordpress to achieve BuddyPress”
That’s complete nonsense, BuddyPress uses most of the existing WordPress API. It’s pretty tiring to hear the same old “WordPress is for blogs” rhetoric from the Drupal crowd.
The fact is that the number of developers using WordPress to build full blown sites is already outpacing those using it to build blogs. The upcoming 3.0 release is a reflection of this.
@Kate Lennon - Social Engine is not open source.
You left out the third element makes social networking the perfect platform storm- enterprise social software providers.
‘Free’ networks, open-source, and enterprise social software make things quite interesting in this new market. Very dynamic and volatile industry.
“@Kate Lennon - Social Engine is not open source.”
No, but it is a “framework” social network that you have to buy outright, run on your own server, and configure and customize yourself.
Open source would be even more problematic.
“Open source would be even more problematic.”
Why? That doesn’t make any sense. Please don’t brand the entire open source movement based on your experiences with one piece of software. Why don’t you give BuddyPress a go and see how they compare?
Great article. The open source frameworks are very powerful.
We use Ruby and it’s great, but it’s a platform and requires
a lot of upfront and on-going customizations.
If you’re looking for a something quick and easy, the ning
model works great.
Caveat - i work for a company that provides a ning like service
for mobile community networks ( http://www.Zerista.com ).
It still boggles my mind on why would people want to trust their data and customers on a completely closed, hosted platform. Tomorrow if Ning comes back and jack their prices 10 fold, what do these customers rather than paying up.
I put my money with open source or source available social networking script like Dolphin , iScripts Socialware, Social engine etc.. It may not be GPL, but i have my source code and data on my server, with tech support from eth developers unlike GPL. This seems to be the best middle ground
1. It’s not a NING problem it’s a user problem. Ning has no problems save bottom line.
2. Drupal is king of kings along siede other openSrc projects where collectively thousands and thousands of people contribute their talents
and creativity and give it away.
Lets look at the bottom line for a user. For 2 years these days one can host a site like drupal for under 100.00 and that includes a free domain name if one needs one. Cost to user with domain and unlimited all 100.00 plus some sweat.
The problem is we live in a “McDonald or Burger King” mind set where many want it all handed to them on a silver platter - and when it is, such as with a Ning concept, rather than read the docs or look through a help forum the requests for support over flow inbound. Though there is ample support in the openSrc community, the mind set is proper and just. If you want to run a kewl website thats social oriented, read the doc’s. Despite, many who contribute to the source or plugins still assist the “you owe me something” crowd.
for those knocking openSrc - like Drupal, see a few of the folks who have grasped the Drupal concept, including The White House.
http://websites.usandv.com/
I really haven’t heard of any one snickering re: ning’s decision, quite the opposite.
And for some. like I who are over 60 it’s kinda sad as we were hoping to have a site remain online if something happened to me, that is historical in nature and set it up on Ning feeling it would be there on their free side, long after we died. I have no problem paying for hosting but you can’t write checks from your casket or urn.
http://hanoipow.ning.com and The Truth: http://eaglesnest2.ning.com