5 comments

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  Racing School

  7 months ago

  It's amazing how the whole situation is spiraling into a big mess. For me, I won't even touch products of these two companies.
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  Daniel J. Pritchett

  7 months ago

  Has something changed lately? It looks like WL moved to SocialGO as a Ning alternative back in October but I haven't heard any updates since then.
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  Spencer Forman

  7 months ago

  You guys realize that there is an awesome new online service called "GOOGLE" right?...
  It's not worth rehashing all that's happened since August, but it does have a happy (and non messy) ending.
  
  1) Ning boots WL, claims we are bad guys and promises all their clients to deliver all good things. We air the correspondence and claim that they are acting in bad faith and are not being forthright;
  
  2) WidgetLaboratory signs a lucrative contract with SocialGo team to create social network platform with better features and terms of service, using over a year of hands-on experience;
  
  3) Ning breaks all promises to its customers and then shuts down their entire network api, public forum, upload access, and all remaining 3rd party developers;
  
  4) Ning breaks all promises to Adult Content owners and gives them less than four weeks to get out, but provides no tools to help them move;
  
  5) WL offers free migration tools to all Ning owners to help them migrate, and to show that Ning could provide the same but won't do so unless forced or shamed into doing the same;
  
  6) SocialGO is moving from Beta into final and is delivering a special package for adult content owners in addition to their regular offerings;
  
  In sum:
  Ning's actions have demonstrated their lack of veracity... WL and SocialGO are providing the tools and customer agreement/support that was promised but never delivered by Ning. No fuss, no muss. Pretty simple. Touch them or not, there are hundreds of thousands who need and want such solutions.
  
  Enjoy!
  Spence
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• 

  Daniel J. Pritchett

  7 months ago

  Thanks for the updates Spencer. I was kinda worried that RacingSchools was a spam commenter but wanted to give him/her the benefit of the doubt.
  
  Nice to see that your business is still growing after the unpleasantness with Ning. I checked SocialGo out this morning and it's now definitely on my list of options when recommending ad-hoc social networks to folks.
  
  While you're here, can you tell me what you think about Facebook FriendConnect and Google OpenSocial? If those expand a bit more they seem like they could really threaten Ning et al - who needs to buy a social network when you can just paste one into an existing site?
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• 

  Spencer Forman

  7 months ago

  Facebook FriendConnect is a nice way to verify who is the source posting to your blog comment wall... otherwise, it's pretty much a non-issue for the rest of the world who don't use Facebook. Gravatar does pretty much the same thing, without having to open a Facebook page.
  
  Google's Open Social is a red-herring. We believe that it sounds all squishy nice and comfy... but in reality, it will never fly. The reason is simply competition. The varying sites that would hypothetically support it and make it truly useful (by giving it actually useful functions) are all competitors. Unless or until they all become one company, you will not see them supporting something in fact that allows their competition to garner their clients. Have you seen anyone eating McDonald's cheesburgers wrapped in a Burger King wrapper lately? It would sure save a lot of wasted energy from creating two different wrappers for basically the same function of eating a cheeseburger...
  
  Be well Daniel... ;-)
  reply