It is more an issue of broken promises and what happens when they already get their value add.
What the community did was worth time and money. All the invested data, beta testing, promotion etc.

Dataownership is the big issue here. And it will continue to be w SaaS and what the repercussions are for broken promises…

I am not at all miffed about 8 wasted minutes of mine. I am guilty of wasting my time far worse then they did. I am unhappy about the collective effort that was wasted. I tried to make it clear that the loss is the effort of all the folks who participated or used the site.

Your valet example is good. Some places offer free valet service. I think ning was much more like that. They made certain promises, and then they broke those promises. Something that was working in the world stopped working because of it. Because of this behavior I am less likely to trust software as a service providers, especially if they don't provide data export. I am also much more likely to USE the data export – which I should have been doing all along instead of relying on it to always be available.

Coincidentally, after this article got onto reddit, digg, twitter etc – I got a little note from the Ning folks. If they actually follow through and get the data export I'll be happy to update and note that.

My arguments are against his very words. And not taken out of context, that's what he's really proposing. He is speaking in absolutist statements.

Furthermore, the we aren't just talking about a few gay dudes who have done something with their lives beyond rutting in the bushes, we are talking about the vast majority of them.

The same kind of reasoning that finds gods or spirits in everything can also find selfishness or genetic fitness in everything. That's where Occam's razor helps you pick among explanations.

Um. I just wrote all that and then I thought maybe you are responding to HerEveryCentCounts. She is using anecdotal evidence, yes. But still, the point stands that Satoishi Kanazawa cannot think.

I sometimes exhibit behaviour x without any trace of motivation y so the theory that behaviour x evolved largely due to motivation y is 100% wrong.

yeah you guys have critical thought all wrapped there…

I 100% agree that people shouldn't start dumping all their data, time, files into a resource that they don't trust – that's part of the freemium model – you spend enough time in our playbox, you'll want to pay for more features (ex. Evernote).

However, there are SaaS providers that are serious about being partners, not vendors. The partnership being, you pay us $ a month and we provide you with a continuing service. Many SaaS providers offer export and backup at anytime.

In my practice as a value migration consultant, I never recommend any providers that don't have that stipulation in their ToS.

Owning the solution, having your own cloud? The people who can actually efficiently maintain that sort of technical solution will always be a niche market. People want an easy to use, friendly service that helps them share and create content to their audience – what's wrong with someone providing that?

Phone service, water, gas, heat, electricity – these are all services. SaaS is the logical extension of this.

What if the valet said "I'll park your car for free; all you have to do is let me put an ad on it". There is still a payment (in ad space, or traffic or whatever). You could just as easily pay cash for a service that sucks.

"Like data on your own computer, if you care enough about it that you would be this upset when it's gone, back it up. If the service doesn't allow you do that *right now* (as opposed to being a feature that's coming soon), then you're on a service that doesn't meet your needs and it's time to move."
I think that was the whole point of this post, wasn't it?

This was a site that cost you exactly 8 minutes of effort in creating and that you didn't check on a regular basis often enough to even know that it went down or that the provider was having issues. That makes the analogy of someone holding your wallet seem more inflammatory than necessary; instead of asking them to hold your wallet, it's more that you asked a stranger to hold some neat looking rocks that you found and then were surprised when, several weeks later, they weren't still protecting them.

Yes, you get what you pay for. Along with even a minor financial commitment is the implication that your work has value that will be respected by the company you give it to. Free or advertising financed services are common on the net, but expectations for them should be lower than more expensive services because paying for something infuses the seller with a sense of responsibility, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of people who can enforce such things. You wouldn't throw your car keys to a random dude on the street and ask him to park it for you, but you might to a valet, even though it would be equally easy for either of them to steal your car. One has some responsibility imposed on them, the other does not, and we all know this inherently.

Free services (like Ning) serve a useful purpose in letting people play around with ideas that they might not be committed enough to pay for. But to expect more out of them is, as you point out, foolish. One good solution is to own things yourself (not a level of commitment everyone wants to have) and the other is simply to identify the transition between "software toy / pet project" and "valuable website" and take responsibility for it. Like data on your own computer, if you care enough about it that you would be this upset when it's gone, back it up. If the service doesn't allow you do that *right now* (as opposed to being a feature that's coming soon), then you're on a service that doesn't meet your needs and it's time to move.

Onscreen keyboards have no little nubs or relief, though some folks are trying to build relief into the screen. I don't buy it – it feels like you are trying to recreate hardware instead of using what is unique to the screen…

I just installed the ShapeWriter soft keyboard for Android ( http://www.shapewriter.com/ ) and I like it. The first sentence took about 2 minutes, but after that it got better. They do something that's almost like typing and let the software correct all your fat finger mistakes. That's getting a lot closer to intent interpreting software…