Category Archives: Social Media

The Skype/Fring dustup and the importance of quick blog – and comment – response

As I wrote about over on Disruptive Telephony recently, Skype recently was attacked by a startup, fring, for allegedly blocking fring’s connections. Today, over on this “Brafton” site, an unnamed author makes good points in “Skype/ fring battle indicates blogs can be good for brand management and link bait.

They point out that Skype was able to quickly respond to the attack with a post out in their own blog. The response post very clearly said that fring’s claims were untrue and led to posts like mine that called fring’s statement into question – as well as the update or revision of many of the posts that had gone out quickly with the initial news.

It was an effective response by Skype – and a great reminder of the power of having a blog with which they could in fact respond.

However, the Brafton writer goes on to point out something I’d noticed as well. Skype’s blog post rapidly filled up with comments – but almost no responses from Skype employees. To their credit, Skype left comments wide open so people left all sorts of comments venting their frustration with various other aspects of Skype’s policy.

As of this moment, there are 219 comments on the post – but only 2 are from someone at Skype (Peter Parkes – who is a great guy) answering 3 of the other 217 comments.

Now, many of the comments are purely venting about the lack of a non-Verizon Android app and a hundred other topics. Perhaps the folks at Skype just realized that they couldn’t possibly satisfy the comments… and just decided to let people vent. Still, the paucity of Skype comments seems kind of glaring. As the Brafton write indicated, some of those comments express disappointment at not seeing more response from Skype… so the commenters did notice. One commenter (michael.nr.burrows) said:

Wow not many blogs get this vociferous, and you know what, the staggering lack of comment from Skype tells me a lot about their attitude to their customers.

It’s curious… in the midst of those comments are some that would seem could have had a response.

The Brafton writer concludes:

The moral of the story is that blogs can be a powerful tool in managing a brand and generating inbound links, but it’s important for corporate bloggers to keep a conversation going by responding to commenters in order to maximize blog brand-boosting opportunities.

I agree… the power of having a corporate blog is to be able to respond quickly to attacks that happen in blogs… but posting the initial post is just the start of the response.

P.S. Prior to writing this, I did try to reach out to Peter Parkes at Skype, but his mood message indicates he’s on vacation through the weekend. Could part of Skype’s challenge be that they only have one person focused on blog response? (I don’t know.) Good question for you all – do you have coverage for people going on vacation?

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Will Diaspora give us an “open Facebook”?

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Timing is everything.

Back on April 24th, four NYU students (pictured: Raphael, Ilya, Daniel and Maxwell), set themselves up on a site called Kickstarter with the goal of raising $10,000 so that they could devote themselves to working full-time through the summer on their idea for Diaspora, “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”. Two of them were graduating, the other two had potential internships… but all they really wanted to do was code.

Three days later they had passed $2500 and were going to start some PR and outreach to relevant blogs.

What they couldn’t have necessarily known was that Facebook would choose this time to anger and alienate so many people with their privacy changes…

TAPPING INTO RAGE

Their one little idea for a project happened to hit the tech world’s radar at just the right time… and landed them with write-ups in tech sites like ReadWriteWeb: Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook. Business insider discussed “Here’s The Privacy Line That Facebook Just Crossed…” and talked about challenges that Diaspora would have. Many other sites mentioned the project and developers tweeted about it.

Then came more mainstream coverage… the Chronicle of Higher Education… then a Huffington Post article… then a New York Times article, both online and in print: Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook… and then even more of the tech media world went crazy… a sampling:

TechCrunch: Diaspora, The Open Facebook Alternative, Soars Past $50,000 In Micro-Funding
GigaOm: Facebook Needs to Find Its Voice on Privacy
Mashable: NYU Students Raise More than $100,000 to Build Facebook Alternative
The Next Web: New Social Networking Darling Diaspora* Has An Idea Problem

And many, many, many, many more…

Tech superstar Leo Laporte deleted his Facebook account on his This Week in Google podcast and promoted Diaspora on the show – and went on to donate $100 to the project. Twitter was filled with comments and links about Diaspora… Very ironically, multiple Facebook pages are up – one by a fan and one by the team… the buzz was all over the tech space…

The end result is that the four guys FAR exceeded their goal… as of this morning they had 4774 backers pledging $174,334! The amount will undoubtedly be more by the time you read this article.

The team has been admittedly overwhelmed and written about how their “situation has changed a little“.

You think?

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Well… given that it’s just an idea that the guys are planning to work on, we don’t exactly know yet… but the ideas they describe are that of a “distributed, decentralized social network” that is much more in line with the “open internet” architecture. ReadWriteWeb had a nice explanation:

So what is Diaspora anyway? Instead of being a singular portal like Facebook, Diaspora is a distributed network where separate computers connect to each other directly, without going through a central server of some sort.

Once set up, the network could aggregate your information – including your Facebook profile, if you wanted. It could also import things like tweets, RSS feeds, photos, etc., similar to how the social aggregator FriendFeed does. A planned plugin framework could extend these possibilities even further.

Your computer, called a “seed” in the Diaspora setup, could even integrate the connected services in new ways. For example, a photo uploaded to Flickr could automatically be turned into a Twitter post using the caption and link.

When you “friend” another user, you’re actually “friending” that seed, technically speaking. There’s not a centralized server managing those friend connections as there is with Facebook – it’s just two computers talking to each other. Friends can then share their information, content, media and anything else with each other, privately using GPG encryption.

It’s about eliminating Single Points of Failure (SPOFs)… it’s about putting you in control.

Just as you can choose to operate your own email server or your own web server… or you can choose to use someone’s hosted email or web server… the idea would be that you could run your own “social network” server – or use someone else’s hosted social network.

It’s not necessarily a new idea… it’s what the great folks at Status.Net are trying to do with an open source micro-blogging platform (I wrote earlier about why it matters) so that we can have a “distributed, decentralized Twitter”… and then with the follow-on “OStatus” effort (which the Diaspora guys reference in their latest post)…

The move toward more open communication is going on in other areas, too… it’s what has been going on in the world of XMPP for years to bring about distributed, decentralized instant messaging (IM)… it’s what the federation aspect of Google Wave could potentially bring us…

THE DIRECTORY CHALLENGE

In my mind, a key challenge the Diaspora team will need to address is:

How do I find someone in the Diaspora network?

In the centralized world of Facebook, I can do a search and with the right search terms easily find and get connected to some long-lost friend. Likewise, I can search in Twitter… or for another example, in Skype. All of these services have a centralized database.

Simple. Easy.

Contrast that to the distributed, decentralized world of the Web… or email… or Jabber/XMPP IM… you have to either know someone’s URL or address… or you have to look it up in a search engine like Google.

It’s not as easy as with a centralized service.

I’ve admittedly sent someone a message on Facebook purely because I didn’t know their “best” email address and didn’t have time to look it up anywhere. I knew that Facebook would provide that linkage – and I was already connected.

Somehow the Diaspora team needs to solve the directory challenge… not sure how, but I wish them the best with it and hope they do.

WILL DIASPORA SUCCEED?

Good question… First it sounds like the team needs to grapple with the overwhelming interest and sort out the best way forward.

Second, their going to have to grapple with the enormous expectations now being placed on them!

Third, we all who are watching are going to have to realize and understand that any project like this doesn’t just appear overnight… that the first iterations will probably need some work… that it won’t slice bread and do a zillion other things on the first day, etc., etc., etc.

Fourth, Facebook may very well make moves to change its privacy policies or make things better in some ways … and perhaps do just enough to calm people down and cool the fervor for an alternative.

Fifth, the reality is that with 400 million people on Facebook, with more signing up each day, there is an enormous inertia against any kind of change. The other reality is that many, many of those “regular” Facebook users don’t realized the importance of these issues and may just not care…

As an advocate for a more open internet, I certainly hope these guys succeed in building out some type of open, distributed, decentralized network… they’re off to a great start with $174K committed and perhaps more importantly a list of ~5,000 supporters passionate enough to give $$$… I’ll certainly watch the project and help in any way I can…

And if nothing else, they have already raised more awareness around why this is important…

Kudos to them for what they’ve done… best wishes to them for what sounds like will be a VERY busy summer for them… and I’m looking forward to seeing what they are able to do…

P.S. And yes, in full disclosure, I pledged $10.. it may or may not work out in the end… but I applaud their creativity and initiative… and I’d love to see it happen!

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Jason Calacanis, Facebook, Privacy and the Open Internet

Celebrating my 10th year of blogging!

Ning’s Phase-Out of Free Services – Smart Business Move? Or Utter Betrayal?

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Much has been made in the social media part of the blogosphere about Ning’s recent decision to end their free services. In a post to their Ning Creators Forum titled “NING UPDATE: PHASING OUT FREE SERVICES“, the company posted an email from their CEO that said most importantly this:

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning.

The post outlined why they need to make the move – and disclosed the fact that they were laying off 69 people.

Some 700 comments later, they closed off comments to the post. The comments seemed to be a great number of very upset users of the free Ning service mixed in with a few folks defending Ning along with Ning employees who seemed to be trying to be genuinely helpful.

The comments across the blogosphere and Twittersphere raged quite strongly. ReadWriteWeb had a post listing alternatives, as did Mashable. TechCrunch reported on sites “welcoming Ning refugees”.

While the news sites may have reported it matter-of-factly, many other sites were full of passion. Many nonprofits and educational institutions wrote about how the were going to have to find some other home because they couldn’t afford fees. My friend Shel Holtz wrote a blistering post called “Ning reneges on its core promise, shatters customer trust“, which included this line:

But the word that keeps repeating in my mind is “betrayal.”

Strong stuff.

Betrayal? Or sound business decision? I understand the arguments on both sides.

IN THE BEGINNING

If you go back in time, Ning was launched with great fanfare in October 2005, a new startup by Marc Andresson of Netscape fame. Per the RWW article I just linked to, Ning’s FAQ (now gone) was:

“Our goal with Ning is to see what happens when you open things up and make it easy to create, share, and discover new social apps.”

I remember the launch… many of us tried it out. I think I even created a Ning network… although I can’t find any email or evidence that I really did. I know I joined a couple. The idea was cool… now anyone can create their own social network!

Over the years Ning raised over $120 million from investors and at one point was valued at over a half billion dollars. Mashable reported one year ago that there were over 1,000,000 networks created on Ning. Ning was one of the early supporters of OpenSocial and rolled out “Ning Apps” to Ning’s 1.5 million networks at that time. I know of many folks in the social media/marketing space who recommended Ning as a platform for people to build communities. I did to several groups. I was even considering using Ning as a platform for a community around my upcoming book like Steve Garfield did for his Get Seen book. (I opted for a blog and a Facebook page instead.)

IN THE END

It now seems rather clear that something was broken with the business model. $120 million dollars and 1.5 million networks later… they chopped 40% of the staff and dropped the free service that brought them so much attention and undoubtedly investment.

It sounds like from a company perspective they had little choice. As a recent Mashable post said (my emphasis added):

We’re not sure how pricing will change over the next few weeks, but what we do know is that the dotcom-era free-for-all of apps, services and content for end users is not-so-gradually coming to a halt. In the light of economic reality, nothing is free. Someone — be it an advertiser, an administrator, an investor or an entrepreneur — is footing the bill for every one and zero that’s electronically transmitted across this great Internet of ours. And at some point, most of those folks expect to see a return on their investment.

“And at some point, most of those folks expect to see a return on their investment.“… indeed. And $120 million of investment is a lot to seek a return on. I can understand that they didn’t have many great choices… and were undoubtedly running out of time.

TRUST AND BETRAYAL

On the other hand, I completely understand the anger, sadness, frustration and passion of all of those who built communities on Ning. Ning offered a great service … all you had to do was bear with seeing the ads that were displayed. In return you had powerful tools to build your own community.

You put your trust in Ning that they would provide this service for free – and now Ning has betrayed that trust.

I don’t envy all the nonprofits, schools, churches and other groups that used Ning as their community and built their communication infrastructure around that site. Sure, there are alternatives, but switching is a pain… you ideally want to move some or all of your content… and you have to bring all your users over with you… It is a lot of work.

It’s easy to say, as I’ve seen many commenters do, that “you get what you pay for“… and to chastise users of Ning’s free service to be so naive to think that it would be around for the long term. But why not? That was the promise made by the company. Build your community here and we’ll make it easy for you to maintain and grow – and so many networks did prosper there.

SPOFs AND “THE INTERNET WAY”

As Shel wrote in his post, I have this issue with “single points of failure” (SPOFs). I’ve written at great length about how Twitter and Facebook violate “The Internet Way” of distributed and decentralized services. I would add Ning to that list as well. It is a centralized service under the control of a single company… and a startup company at that.

The problem in relying on a single company/service/platform is that if you are locked in to that company/service/platform, you have a single point-of-failure.

They die… you die.

Compare the Ning situation to, say, garden-variety web hosting providers. You can get web hosting pretty much anywhere for an inexpensive amount of money. Upload your HTML files, point your domain there… ta da… your website is up and running.

Don’t like the web hosting provider? Or have too many service problems? Or have the web hosting provider fail as a business? No problem… sign up with another web hosting provider… upload your HTML files (you do have a backup, right?)… point your domain there… and ta da… you’re back in action. You have many, many, many choices for web hosting providers… it’s all distributed and decentralized.

CONTROL AND PORTABILITY

With a web hosting provider… or even an email provider… there is a fundamental feature:

YOU ARE IN CONTROL!

If you don’t like the provider, you can move. You aren’t locked in. Sure, it may be a pile of work… and moving your domain may be a hassle if you didn’t retain control of it… but it’s relatively straightforward to move. Even if you use PHP or other scripting languages, odds are that you can move your web site to another provider, because…

Web sites are portable as they are based on open standards.

Usually… unless, of course, the web hosting provider found some way to make your administration “simpler” and subsequently lock you in to their services.

When using Ning, though, you sacrifice that control and portability in the name of simplicity. It’s easy and simple (and free!) to set up a Ning community. It can be a lot harder to set up your own software on your own server – and it will probably cost you something. The same can be said of Facebook and using a Facebook Page or Group… or using any of the many other services out there that let you build communities.

A HARSH LESSON

Sadly, hundreds of thousands of actual users (perhaps millions) are learning about control and portability in a bitter and harsh lesson. They will soon learn about what pricing Ning will be offering… and they will have to make their choices. Pay some fee… move their community… or simply shut it down. I already know that one of the ones I am a member of will be moving. I expect many others will move as well.

I can only hope… and that is what it is – “hope”… that as Ning community administrators look at alternatives, they will ask those providers the tough questions, like:

How do I know you will be around in a while?
How can I trust you not to screw me like Ning just did?
What is your business model?
How easy is it for me to move my community OFF of your platform if I choose to do so?

And so on…

As for Ning, I wish them luck… I somehow think they’re going to need it.

UPDATE: John Cass has an excellent post tracking many good posts involved in the conversation about Ning’s changes.

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Ch..ch..changes in the For Immediate Release (FIR) podcast – and the impact to my reports