Web platforms aren't stagnating. What is stagnating is people's desire to give free labor for someone else's profit.

Free labor? With the non evil model of Ning it's not exactly free labor. Ning provides a product/service for which users pay.

Now if they did in fact merge everyone into a giant social network and then profit from it that would be pretty evil and you could then make an argument for the 'free labor' part but only if you accept that paying for ad removal constituted an agreement that your network is an 'island'.

The labor is creating the network, managing the network, sending emails to your network so they can stay up to date. Not to mention all the technical issues of setting it up, styling it, making it useful, etc...

Now, ning is taking all that work to build a list of eyeballs and using it for their profit without compensating the builders of each individual network.

Don't discount the amount of effort -- and WORK -- involved in maintaining a social network. If you still think it's easy, read Hackers and Painters. pg explains why the hackers don't have a lot of friends and the social people don't concentrate as much on academics -- because both are very difficult to do and require a lot of WORK.

(I work for Ning)

It can take a huge amount of effort to build a social networking site. It can, also, take no perceived effort on the part of the person setting it up. You need to separate out the "I am building this for profit and see it as work" and "I am looking for a place on the interwebs which lets me interact with people in this way" -- we support both, and other, models. If we can find a way to make it even easier on the part of network creators, in terms of setting it up, building a community, etc, we will do it.

If you build up a profit or brand oriented network, you should probably consider running your own ads on it, you can do that (we then charge you, a small amount, for actually hosting it).

If you want a private SNS for your family and friends, boy scout troop, class, conference, user group, or any of the almost infinite reasons people want it, then the free model (where we run adds and hope to profit) may fit you best.

In the model you describe, the lack of compensation to the network builder is purely monetary. We provide goods (albeit virtual), support for those goods, and a continuous stream of improvements on those goods :-)

I have used Ning only briefly a couple of times. I haven't set up a site on it.

What if they want to leave, the customers, can they just grab their data and go somewhere else? To another social network like Facebook or MySpace or somewhere like that? LinkedIn?

I had a client that moved to Ning... they have not grown very much since the migration from their homegrown platform.

I have a friend who moved to ning. They find it slow and inflexible. I'm suggesting they move to an open platform, like AroundMe (which, if they need to, they can customize. No can do with Ning).

Is this guy a conspiracy nut? He goes off the deep end in that last paragraph, and his whole blog is rife with 9/11 inside job rhetoric and new world order nuttery. He uses the phrase "conspiracy factualist" in another post. Please lets not get taken over by the 911 truth nutters like reddit.

I thought he had an interesting point about how you can increase your user's trust in your social network platform by specifying the rules more clearly, having a constitution of sorts for your users.

But then, yeah, last paragraph - totally off the deep end. It's not that I'm opposed to his views, they just don't need to be inserted as a non-sequitur into unrelated conversations.

Then again, maybe he thinks social network platforms should print their own money, in which case the experience of US govcorp is informative.

"a constitution of sorts for your users"

When your users are trying to build businesses, they'll eventually realize they need demand a binding statement of reasonable terms, i.e., a contract. The system only scales if all the users accept one contract, or minor variations on a single contract. Therefore, a constitution is a brilliant idea.

The idea will encounter resistance because it contradicts two related biases that were ingrained during the early years of the web. First, the contract accepted by all users is a EULA (which eliminates all rights and guarantees no matter what the consumer thinks), not a contract (which attempts to specify a reasonable relationship acceptable to both parties). Second, people using a web site are consumers (who must be screwed blatantly and thoroughly) rather than business partners (who must be screwed subtly, if at all). I would love to see these two assumptions challenged.

For those building business, there's money changing hands, and I think equitable contracts will spring up sooner - Google's recent snafus come to mind as examples of what happens when income streams are subject to "as-is" terms.

But for free services, "as-is" agreements will always reign supreme. The ability to sue a company for violating said agreement is not worth much to a user, while creating a huge aggregate liability for the company.

The way to give users rights is through technical means - export functionality and interoperability create well-defined capabilities that users can easily understand and exercise.

> A few years ago, this type would have been a believer in the upcoming "singularity."

The belief that technology will usurp governments is more than "a few years old" (the cyphernomicon was written in 1994).

> The belief that technology will usurp governments is more than "a few years old"

What the article writer is talking about is not technology per se, but a new social structure. Which is just the same "nothing new under the sun" phenomenon if you look back in history. The printing press (another disrupting technology) helped usher in modern democracy and eventually the corporation, but they still suffered the same ills prior organizational structures like the church or the kingdom did. "Platforms" will not make the bad parts of human nature go away.

i am a conspiracy nut, though the purpose of the post was to illustrate that web platforms need to develop their own legal system that will challenge the nation-state in order to grow. so the political nature of the last paragraph was wholly relevant to the thesis of the post.