WidgetLaboratory Continues to Air Ning’s Secrets

By Daniel J. Pritchett on August 24th, 2008

Third-party application developer WidgetLaboratory has taken their ongoing battle with social networking platform Ning one step further by posting the final few days worth of email conversation before the two companies broke off negotiations.

These emails are a fascinating look under the covers of what’s clearly been a very tense week for both organizations. Following the rapid descent from cool but civil conversations between Ning co-founder Nina Bianchini and WidgetLaboratory co-founder Spencer Forman to hostile snipes between Mr. Forman and Ning’s general legal counsel is a chilling look into the realities of third-party application development and the downsides of the Software as a Service (SaaS) movement.

After reading every word of these 16 pages I’ll say that neither side comes out looking rosy. Ning’s people seem calmer and more measured in their responses but they are still dinged by Forman’s accusation that an undocumented and unnanounced API change broke many third-party apps on the Ning platform. Mr. Forman is evidently angry from the beginning as his company’s symbiotic relationship with Ning quickly unravels. By taking these last two steps of open sourcing his products and then publicizing all of these private emails it’s clear that Mr. Forman has taken the scorched earth approach to moving on from this Ning-WidgetLaboratory debacle.

The juiciest tidbits come on page 15 and 16 where Mr. Forman and Ning counsel Bob Ghoorah trade barbs about the technological inadequacies of their respective organizations.

Ghoorah:

Your team has neither the expertise nor the capacity to implement effective technical solutions to these recurring problems. In many cases, it has taken WidgetLaboratory weeks to fix the broken code and only after repeated attempts by Ning’s engineering team to assist.

Forman:

Your references to the qualifications of our staff are rather amusing and absurd considering Ning’s bloated staff worked on their own till 3am with no solution… and then in TWO MINUTES following a call to Mick the problem was solved. If anything, you should consider whether to hire WidgetLaboratory to help Ning with your technical issues.

Ning and WidgetLaboratory won’t be working together again any time soon. I believe that Ning will survive this embarassment with a lesson to be more communicative with their third-party developers. As for WidgetLaboratory? I am sure that Forman’s group will be able to replicate their success on a different network, but they may find it difficult to engage new partners in their enterprise until they manage to rebuild to a strong position of their own.

The entire email conversation is available below thanks to Scribd.

UPDATED: Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has weighed in on this latest development with a decidedly anti-WidgetLabs take.

Read this document on Scribd: WidgetLaboratory Correspondence with Ning
© 2008 Daniel J. Pritchett & sharingatwork.com

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Viewing 5 Comments

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    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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    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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    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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    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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    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... ;-)
 

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