Do Free Services Have an Obligation to Users? Should We Regulate Them?
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? 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. In any case, this sucks. (No, I don't have an active Ning network. I did create one or two for
experimental purposes but they never blossomed because I wasn't
impressed with the feature set available there compared to setting up
my own sites using WordPress and/or SocialSAM and/or NOLOH.)
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? 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. In any case, this sucks. (No, I don't have an active Ning network. I did create one or two for
experimental purposes but they never blossomed because I wasn't
impressed with the feature set available there compared to setting up
my own sites using WordPress and/or SocialSAM and/or NOLOH.)
