Posts Tagged ‘competition’

Migrate from Ning to WackWall

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Oh Ning. We expressed our humble opinion on Ning’s move, we clarified our position and we created an import tool for those willing to migrate from Ning to WackWall. Here is the summary of how you do it step by step.

1) CREATE A COMMUNITY SITE ON WACKWALL

Create a social network with us. Tweak its settings so it’s ready to accept your audience.

2) IMPORT YOUR DATA FROM NING

To import your user data from Ning you need to take your data from your Ning social network (Your site on Ning -> Manage -> Members -> Export All Member Data (.CSV) ) and go to the admin area of your WackWall social network that you intend to import users to and go to Manage Plugins page:

Scroll down to the Inactive Plugins section. There you need to activate Ning member import plugin:

When the plugin is activated go to its Settings page:

*What is DOES*
a) It exports your user data from Ning with profile info. If for some reason import breaks in the middle you can safely process this again – it will not create duplicate members;
b) It retrieves member avatars from Ning;
c) It also automatically creates profile questions that existed on your Ning social network;
d) Imported users should use their email for password when logging in. Tip your members to log in and change passwords as soon as possible.

*What it DOES NOT*
a) It doesn’t import content from your Ning site like discussions, photos, groups, videos, etc. This is impossible since Ning doesn’t give this opportunity. I would dump them for this reason alone. :)
b) It doesn’t notify your members about the move to the new site. After the import you should close registration on your old Ning site, put a big message on the index page with the link to the new site, and send broadcast message to all members on Ning site that they should now log in to their profiles on the new site on WackWall.

3) NOTIFY YOUR USERS

As described right in the import tool you should notify your members that you are moving. Everybody will move at their own comfortable time with the ready account you’ve transferred for them. Again, your members should use their emails for passwords to sign in and they should change their passwords as soon as possible.

4) QUESTIONS?

If you have questions or problems with this import tool feel free to browse our support board: http://getsatisfaction.com/wackwall. On this board our customers report best communication experience they’ve ever had with any company. We also have happy customers there enthusiastic about helping others. So far this is our biggest achievement.

We hope you will find a better home for your community on WackWall.

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Posted in Wall.fm | 22 Comments »

Ning to WackWall. Clarification.

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Within the last 4 days we have received an overwhelming amount of questions about our plans to support migration from Ning to WackWall. Also a lot of people ask about the current state of WackWall; what’s going to be next; is their data safe and so on.

That is why I want to summarize all in one, detailed blog post with our official position, so people know what to expect from us right now and in the future.

  • Migration assistance

    WackWall will offer migration tool that will allow to import your Ning user data to a social network on WackWall. We are developing this right now. Expect news from us within a couple of days.

  • WackWall status and future

    WackWall is currently beta and everything is available free. After the end of beta period in summer we will introduce premium features such as ad control, WackWall reference removal, extra storage and bandwidth, member billing, custom domain.

    Basic plan (sufficient for most websites) will be free. If we _ever_ plan to phase out the free plan it will only affect new websites.

  • How WackWall guarantees you will not have to move to another platform EVER

    This is not about promises. This is about the fact that WackWall is powered by OpenWack – open source social networking software.

    If you ever plan to go independent of WackWall you can take software and full backup of your community data (users, content, design, settings) and set up an exact copy of your site on an independent server. You can also obtain help with that from the open source community. We will develop a backup tool available for everyone.

  • Difference between WackWall and Ning

    Ning is a company that took giant investment and has to live up to the expectations of investors. They clearly wanted to create something more than a white-label social networking service but advertised just that. They launched cross-network connections and put all profiles on Ning.com – this move was speaking about their ambition “to rule them all”. Somehow customers hated the idea of their communities being thrown into the next wanna-be Facebook so Ning had to backpedal. Grow-fast-sell-big strategy also didn’t work for them so now they are switching to aggressive monetization. They need to return all those invested funds either way. Somebody has to pay the bills. If not Google/Yahoo/MS then you, the customer. This is logical and it may even be good. The problem is overnight decisions that disrupt millions of communities.

    Unlike Ning, we are a software company. Private and profitable. We aim at a steady organic growth. We do not seek for investment nor do we plan to sell out. The only thing we plan to compete on is our software. Our only ambition is to offer something that effectively solves collective needs – which is why communities gather in the first place. If you see value and need extra (premium) features for accomplishing your goals – they will be available for a fee. Freemium is not dead, dead is forgetting why people use your product.

    You can say it this way – we have open source software, and WackWall is a hosted version of it, aimed at increasing adoption of OpenWack software among the masses. This is why WackWall will always have basic plan for free. Open source is a completely different business model and is beyond the scope of this blog post.

Ask questions, we are open to dialog and we will let you know about the progress of Ning import tool.

Thanks,
Emil Sarnogoev
CEO

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Posted in Misc, Wall.fm | 24 Comments »

Ning throws out free users. Who could have thought?

Friday, April 16th, 2010

OK, I could see that happen again. I wrote about it here and here back in 2008.

Today Ning served as a ridiculously classic example of the problem that we effectively solve at WackWall. In short: With hosted social network providers 1) you don’t own your data, 2) you can be thrown out any day.

When we launched WackWall we thought it wasn’t even worth starting with a mission statement “like Ning but better”. This is what all others seem to pursue. So now every other social network provider says “we promise we will never do that to you”. Really? Even if it makes perfect business sense?

The reality is you can’t trust any hosted provider when they promise to maintain and support you for free for life. You can’t trust even us.

However with WackWall the whole situation changes because we are open source. You can go completely independent without a day of downtime and without users even noticing the move. You can do that on your own initiative not necessarily waiting for atrocities, Ning-style. Again, read and understand what our focus is: http://wackwall.com/freedom.php.

Imagine if Ning gave you its software and contents of your site in full? So you could set it up on your own server so nobody would notice a single change? This is what WackWall is about.

Thanks god, we are a private and profitable company. We do not need to justify stratospheric investment and market valuations. Nor do we have to support 200 employees – I wonder what they all would do.

That’s all fine. How can WackWall help Ning refugees NOW?

Today we checked our support email to find the shower of inquiries about migration from Ning to WackWall. That is why I want to share how we plan to help.

Within the following week we hope to have a completely automated Ning migration tool. We reviewed our development plan and decided we had to give this task the first priority. Send us your export data so we can help you get up on your feet.

If you have any questions, let us know. Browse our support boards for help from employees and happy customers.

Thanks,
Emil Sarnogoev
CEO

*Update*: Here is more info about migration and answers to some questions.

*Update 2*: How to migrate your Ning site to WackWall

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Posted in Misc, Wall.fm | 43 Comments »