I’m warning you – this is snarky.
I was only vaguely following the brou-ha-ha over Causes leaving Myspace. Only vaguely because I don’t really keep close track of the goings on in the Social Networking space: it’s not my passion. I use them a lot, both for work as well as for personal use. I know they are becoming an increasingly important tool for nonprofits in communicating with their constituents, and so I do keep them in my peripheral vision, for sure.
Anyway, in reading the varied reactions to this news, I had to just sigh, and then get annoyed. Sigh because of what feels to me to be the wasted energy that the nonprofit sector has spent over many years, using, hawking, and supporting proprietary tools and companies. Annoyed because it seems the nptech community hasn’t figured this out, even being hit over the head with this over, and over, and over again.
Make no mistake about it – Causes is a for profit company, and they are making what is, I’d bet, a decision based entirely on economics. If you’ve read any of the gloomy news from Silicon Valley, this is just the beginning. Social ventures will not be immune to the blowing winds of economic distress.
If we keep building our nonprofit toolsets on proprietary software and for-profit web services, even if they are free (for now) we are going to be bit by this over and over again. The only way we’re going to get out of this cycle is to channel this energy and resources into open software (including “open” source apps for proprietary web services), open standards, and open networks – things no one can take away.
I love to write blog entries about successful open source efforts – like CiviCRM, or the amazing stuff people are doing in the mobile space. Writing blog entries about for-profit web vendors that make economic decisions that hurt nonprofits because we depend on them too much is just not fun.
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Hear, hear.
At Netsquared Year 2, I led a session called “If your nonprofit has a social media strategy, why?” My argument was that the space is too volatile to make big investments in any one platform, particularly when there’s so much work to be done inside our organizations, educating executives and staff as to the now two way nature of the internet. But I also pointed out that this landscape is going to change. Facebook, being the right thing at the right time, might well get enough of a foothold to still be around in five or ten years. But, in the meantime, the social functionality that they provide will grow more and more omnipresent in our applications and networking environments. Facebook knows this, too — that’s why they bought Friendfeed and are pushing Facebook Connect. They’re not going to beat Google’s move to democratize web 2.0 communication (and open-sourcing Wave is a huge step in that direction) by saying “come to our site instead”.
With all of that in mind, I am sorry to hear about non-profits who will now have to regroup on how they maintain the relationship with their MySpace constituents and recover from the rug that’s been pulled out from under them. But I advise everyone to hedge your investments. This type of upheaval will keep on coming. It doesn’t mean don’t do it; it just means, have a backup plan. Social networking will not ultimately be tied to any particular web address.
Michelle and Peter -
Thanks for this conversation!
I understand your frustration and hear you loud and clear on the fact that the Causes episode isn’t a new issue. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a unique opportunity to connect with a new audience of nonprofits about using open source now and thinking about, building towards, and helping call for a more open web in the future.
I do believe it’s unreasonable to expect all organizations to use only self-hosted, open source, or in-house tools (and am not saying that’s what you are calling for either), so I’m hoping we can use the Causes example as a case study in balancing what’s done in 3rd party places and what isn’t. For example, ensuring there is correct information about your organization on other platforms, that there are enough tools/options/logos/messages/etc that individuals can campaign for you, connect to you, and so on. But that registration with the organizations, sign ups for campaigns/newsletters/alerts, and actions are handled by the organization’s site so the data can be retained and monitored. Obviously the actual case studies would be more fleshed out, but that’s just an example.
Again, thanks for continuing the conversation!
Just came across this and thought I’d set the record straight. Almost no one was using the MySpace application. In two years of conversations not one of our 12,000 nonprofit partners said that they actively used the MySpace application. Morevoer, user adoption of the app was on the order of 100,000 (vs. 100 million on Facebook). We are a small team and had to make a decision between investing more resources in something that wasn’t working or in something that has done a lot of good for nonprofits. It’s probably fair to call this a business decision, or an efficient allocation of resources, or however you want to say it, but I don’t find anything wrong with deciding to improve what works rather than promoting something that doesn’t. What disturbs me is that this decision became an opportunity for poorly-informed commentators to knock down a straw man.