Ning is a Social Media community. Kinda like Blogspot, except they cater to making it feel more like a Social Network rather than a Blog Network. You can sign up, create your community and invite all your friends to enter pictures, forum posts and lots more.
WidgetLaboratory is a site that offers Products that are free and site licenses priced up to $140 a pop. It was found at widgetlaboratory.ning.com, but is no longer there. Ning stated that WidgetLaboratory broke the terms of service. They won’t say more than that and WidgetLaboratory is not happy as they posted on their new Blogspot website.
OK, does anyone else see the problem here?
WidgetLaboratory – GET YOUR OWN HOSTING PLAN. I can’t believe they are letting other people control their business. If you find the right host you have a site for under $100 a year. You can back it up and if they take it down, you can get some legal action taken (unless your site is not legal). Remember: Open source software can be your friend.
Instead, you lost your website for at least a day and you probably can’t access the site to get the site design. Do you think moving to Blogspot is the answer? I would really think this is a good learning experience.
The good news is WidgetLaboratory is planning on making their code Opensource. Since a lot of other “Businesses” that are on Ning (Why?), they are offering Safe Harbor, whatever that means.
Tell you what. If your “Business” was affected by this problem, then dump Ning, dump WidgetLaboratory, give me a call and I’ll build you a website for a reasonable price.
Bottom line – if you have a business, DON’T rely on a free service. Ning might have had good reason to do what they did, but the “Business” lost out. However, you might want to ask WidgetLaboratory what “Term of Service” they broke. If they are phishing your customers, you may want to be a bit concerned.
I don’t know the full story here, but I can’t help but get the sneaking suspicion that this is another case of programmers that don’t have a head for business. (I’m not stereotyping, I’m just speaking of cases that I have seen many times.)
I think that there are incredible amounts of good software projects on the Internet that could be made profitable if only the programmers that started it had some sense for business.
I mean, what you are stating in this articles should be PAINFULLY obvious to anyone, and yet it probably isn’t. Well, that is all the more power for those of us that can deal with tech AND business ;-)