Ning’s Disgruntled Widget Maker Returns: Back As SocialGO Partner
WidgetLaboratory, a widget platform that is still flinging abuse in Ning’s direction after being kicked off the make-your-own-social-net host for terms-of-use violation this summer, is back: this time, on upstart UK Ning imitator SocialGO.
WidgetLaboratory, which sells its widgets for $30 a month, kicked up a stink in August, when Ning disabled widgets across its network, and has been blogging its dissatisfaction since. But now the outfit is returning with a revenue-sharing partnership on SocialGO, the still-in-beta Ning follower that’s being launched for Lara Croft and Tiger Woods DVD game maker Bright Things by Alex Halliday, the merely 22-year-old developer who says he has a team of 11 working on the project.
The tie-up will see WidgetLaboratory facilitate SocialGO’s “widget store”, letting users pick gadgets to add to their on-site social nets. Still trying to leverage the Ning fall-out, Halliday posted a “bill of rights” to protect his customers from “draconian” rules. There’s talk of “monetising” the widgets, but it’s not clear how that will work exactly. SocialGO’s premium option costs $19.99 (£12.22) a month. There’s talk of “monetising” the widgets, but it’s not clear how that will work exactly.
Thanks for the blog post. Just to clear up a few things, the widgets in the store will start from free and will be sold for a one-off fee rather than a monthly payment although this is of course subject to change as we get feedback from our developers.
The third party program is one part of a series of changes to SocialGO over the next 8 weeks which will make the service a more flexible framework for network owners. The ability to mash-up the features and add custom-code throughout their network is something we are increasing support of with the release of our new admin system shortly.
Later today we will be posting an update on our blog alongside a refined terms of service, which protects network owners and gives them the reassurances they need to build a long-term businesses out of their niche networks. This is alongside a series of monetization tools including PayPal subscription integration and additional monetization tools as well.
We look forward to a busy few months and to converting the skeptics too :) Subscribe to http://www.SocialGO.com/blog for further updates.
One final note, Spencer and his team are a totally seperate team with their own views. We are glad to faciliate their creativity and energy and look forward to working with them in the future.
SocialGO is currently in beta and running on test servers with only a handful of social networks. Wait until there are more networks and Widgetlab's widgets start hammering the system or bring it down with bugs in their code. Maybe at that time SocialGO will understand why they got booted from Ning.
It's easy to contain a faucet leak with a soup bowl but what can you use to contain a rain fall? ;)
@Angel, We have carefully constructed our third party platform to allow WidgetLaboratory and other third parties to build and deploy widgets without them being able to cause any damage to the overall platform. It's difficult to imagine how a small bit of code could cause a total shutdown of a platform.
@Alex
Yikes, you're kidding right? Have you ever done load testing of an api? A single loop getting out of hand can bring down your system before you even have time to say "oh sh*t!" ;)
All I'm saying is that everything has some truth to it. I have a few networks on Ning and even though some of the decisions made there were not entirely transparent, WidgetLab's widgets DID cause many issues at times and a lot of us network creators can attest to that!
What more can I say, good luck with this partnership. If everything works out with SocialGO, I'll even give it a shot!
Angel
Angel, are you suggesting that it was widgetlab's widgets hammering Ning's system that caused ning to switch them off?
Plus don't you think Socialgo have already thought about this before signing this deal?
@Angel,
seems to me that Ning has shown their own cards since the day they booted WidgetLaboratory for their "claims" of Service Violations. Since that time they have removed their forums, closed all discussion on the developer boards, removed the REST API that the entire platform was founded upon, removed use of PHP, removed SFTP access, removed WebDAV upload capability other than for CSS purposes, killed all present customized sites and owners from maintaining their existing work-product, and so on.
So, it occurs to me that this is an awful lot of "bad things" going on at Ning with their infrastructure, but they can't blame this on WidgetLaboratory. Makes me think that the widget guys were simply whistleblowers and telling the truth.
For my part, I'm pretty happy to know that SocialGO is being up-front, open, honest, and giving us this inside information. Ning never tells anyone anything. They simply act and let their users suffer with the consequences.
Dan
@Alex: It’s difficult for you to imagine how a small bit of code could cause a total shutdown of a platform because you've never built anything that scales to hundreds of thousands or millions of users. If you're lucky you'll get the chance to do that, and then it's very likely that you won't be so glib.
@Daniel (aka Spencer): my networks have been rock solid since WL was turfed out; I'd prefer that over faux 'openess and honesty' any day. It's easy to preach about how up front you are when you don't have any customers ;-)