How Ning made me a chump and how you can avoid it | Hacker News Reader

How Ning made me a chump and how you can avoid it

morelightmorelight.com

75 pointsskorks16 comments

The sad fact is that most users don't care about vendor lock-in and it is not in the interest of these companies to make it easy to export your data for use with another service.

I based my first startup around the fact that my users could pack up and take their site anywhere at any time and made it a one-click affair to do so. Unfortunately, this really wasn't enough of a pain point to have a significant affect on sales.

Major kudos to the dataliberation.org Google engineers for addressing this issue.

I'd like to make the data a little more portable on my site (http://www.obsidianportal.com), but it's one of those edge cases that always gets pushed to the bottom of the TODO list.

It's not that I'm sitting here twirling my moustache about vendor lock-in, just that there are so many other more-pressing user-facing things to work on.

If my users made a concerted effort to pressure me on this front, I'd probably do something, but so far it's just been a couple of stray "hey, can i get a data dump?" requests.

The article starts and ends with a dataliberation.org link, so after a bit of hesitation I decided to check it out. Lo and behold:

> The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.

That was NOT what I expected. With things like this Google really goes a long way towards proving its "do not evil" mission statement. Not just the thing in itself, but the fact that it was a few engineer's initiative which nobody supressed, and doesn't even have "marketing" written all over it.

To understand this you need to know that back in 2005, Ning wasn't as restrictive a your-own-customized-social-network service as it is now, it allowed you to build several kinds of social, "web 2.0"-ish pages like hot-or-not type rating sites, restaurant review sites and social bookmarking sites. You could "clone" the sites others had created and you even had some level of access to the underlying PHP code.

You can find references to that in old blog posts: http://blog.ning.com/2005/10/rate_my_anything.html

It's these applications that according to the article Ning later turned off, after they had moved to a new model.

I think the interesting thing is summarized in this http://getsatisfaction.com/ning/topics/ning_tos_its_our_resp... Unless I've missed it, they say backups are your responsibility and they don't provide a method to backup the data. I do believe data security is the responsibility of whoever is setting up the service. I think it's just one of those things you have to check when you're exposing something to the public, to avoid showing your ass basically.

edit : also I think a scrape of only the salient pieces of data on his site, the settings files, would have been the 80/20 on backing up without a policy from ning

Coding horror still links to the ning site that was erased, which is now parked by spammers.

Say I offer to hold your wallet for you while you swim. When you get out of the pool some of the pictures are missing. Is it ok that I wasn’t charging you to hold your wallet?

Is it smart of you to entrust things which you value to a complete stranger whom has made no guarantees to you as to the safety of your items?

This sounds to me like the issue with GoDaddy yesterday, if you don't trust your host, then maybe you shouldn't be using them.

How do you guys feel about this? (taken from the Data Liberation Front's website which was linked at the beginning of the article)

"...we always encourage people to ask these three questions before starting to use a product that will store their data:

Can I get my data out at all? How much is it going to cost to get my data out? How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

The ideal answers to these questions are: Yes. Nothing more than I'm already paying. As little as possible."

My problem with it is that there IS a cost to exporting this data. That cost has to be paid by someone. Is it fair to work that into your price when it's a feature that perhaps very few users might actually use? How often should you allow users to back up their data?This is mostly in the context of SAAS products that are not free.

I’m not kidding, this is important in a job where most of what you do is sip coffee and type.

Don't forget "sprays coffee onto keyboard when you read that most of what you do is sip coffee and type".

Is there a non hosted Ning alternative?

I've never used it but http://elgg.org/ might be an option.

I would steer clear, the code is pretty bad, support is close to non-existent, documentation is lacking, and its not very well architected.

Wordpress has packaged some things together into BuddyPress, a modified Wordpress MU solution.

Also, Wordpress MU is being merged into the core Wordpress, I believe in the 3.0 release, and the most recent release of BuddyPress is no longer limited to MU.

http://buddypress.org/

http://mu.wordpress.org/

http://www.drupalgardens.com/ is providing a free hosted Drupal service. It's in private beta but you can sign up for a code or wait around until it goes public. They have (or will have) an export-site-to-code feature which will send you a zipped up version of all the code running your site + a database dump.

There's SocialEngine. It's kinda an ugly pile of PHP, but it's decently usable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com