Way back in July 2010 (which is light years in internet time), the “create-your-own-social-network” platform Ning decided to nix its freemium model in favor of a tiered pricing plan. Even though its lowest tier, for groups under 150 members, was only $2.95 a month, many small nonprofits, civil service organizations, and other groups already strapped for cash that were using the Ning platform as their main hub were up a creek with nowhere to go. So I wrote a post about a service I was familiar with called Amazee, and called it “a winning alternative to Ning for cause-based communities.”

It was recently brought to my attention in the comments of that post by one Tobias Eigen of Saidia.org that Amazee will now also be shutting down, as of December 23 of this year. Tobias wrote a post about this story, and drew some lessons from it in particular for civil society organizations looking for “free” places to host their campaigns and other stuff. He feels very strongly that they should be looking to open platforms (preferably run by other civil society organizations), so as to not get shafted again.

Said Tobias,

This trend reminds me just how important it is to have civil society platforms run by civil society organizations. We need to have reliable places we own and can rely on to put our stuff and to run our campaigns to fight for our communities, our environment, the future of our world.

I couldn’t agree more, and encourage you to visit Saidia.org to read further into his points.

As an example of an open platform, Tobias points to Kabissa, a volunteer-run platform which is a “space for change in Africa,” and supported by donations from the community. While I personally love this idea, unfortunately not all nonprofits have the knowledge of how to set something like this up, which as I pointed out, was why the Nings and the Amazees existed in the first place.

An alternative open platform,  WiserEarth.org, was mentioned in the comments, and while it is an open platform, I personally found the usability rather poor and hard to navigate. There’s very little “social” about it, and most of the causes I indicated interest in hadn’t had any activity in months. I see WiserEarth (as a concept) as a step in the right direction, but they really need to work on their UX.

When looking for alternatives a couple months ago I found  Mixx, which since I began researching for this post, has change into a platform called Chime.in, a network based around interests. When researching what happened to Mixx, I found this on the Wikipedia entry:

As of October 4, 2011, the Mixx Classic website has been shut down and now only displays a “we’ll be back soon message” and a e-mail address collection form which subscribes you to a newsletter that will announce the relaunch of Mixx. As of October 8, 2011, this message still exists. All former Mixxers lost all their saved and indexed data despite being promised otherwise by the Mixx staff. All Mixx user profiles have been deleted. The profile pages return errors, do not even 301 redirect to home, and the site lost significant PageRank and potential rankings. Apparently a total fail.

As I write this, obviously the Wikipedia entry hasn’t been updated, but I’m sure it will be soon. (I’m too lazy to do it myself right now.) The concept of Chime.in itself is fine and not too unlike what the original Mixx was, but this serves as yet one more reason you should not be reliant on third-party platforms. They’re always subject to change, and like Amazee, Mixx offered no downloadable CSV or XML file, or any other way for users to preserve/archive their content.

While the majority of the emphasis in this post thus far is on civil society organizations/nonprofits, as I said in the comments of Tobias’ post, it isn’t just  those folks that need to keep this in mind.

No matter if you are nonprofit, for-profit, a public figure, musician, etc. — You need to have your own “home base.” Period.

I’ve personally always advised my clients, regardless of what kind of entity they are, that they needed to “own” their presence on the web and not rely on other platforms such as Facebook, though those are a nice complement to your online presence.

I don’t know how many musicians I’ve worked with who have insisted that they “didn’t need a website because Facebook/Twitter/ReverbNation/whatever was enough.” All I had to do was point to MySpace and the demise of its relevancy on the social web, asking them if they’d REALLY like to keep migrating from platform to platform all the time and not having an online “homebase.” Oh, and grab your digital knapsacks, kids, as of the other day, there’s now Google Music.

I also know there are myriad small businesses who are in this similar mentality that they don’t need a website, their presence on Facebook is “enough.” Guess what? It’s not enough. If you’ve got a presence on Facebook, Twitter, now Google+, etc. … THAT’S GREAT. Good for you for learning how to check off a box, no matter how much you might hate the “hassle” of doing it. BUT, unless you own it, you’re just squatting on free property until “the next big thing” comes along or, in the case of Amazee, that property decides to close down.

“Oh, but where to start?”

I undertand that a lot of the ins and outs of this can seem overwhelming or intimidating to people who are not “digital natives” or otherwise comfortable on the web. But it doesn’t have to be.

There are plenty of resources out there to buy domains and host a site. I personally prefer 1and1.com for my domains and host elsewhere (though they host, too), but there’s GoDaddy, BlueHost, Rackspace, and plenty of others out there. If you fear the technical stuff or the design stuff, most of them offer “one-click installs” of various content management systems, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others. For collaboration purposes, in the place of something like Amazee, MediaWiki is usually one of the one-click installs offered, and it’s pretty popular with the nonprofits and rather straight forward.

If you are still overwhelmed and don’t know where/how to start, there’s also Page.ly, where you can set up a WordPress self-hosted site and host it, and they’ll even give you plenty of templates to get you started with a “look.”

I can’t stress enough how important it is for everyone, no matter if they’re a nonprofit, band, brand, small business, “public figure,” singing midget telegram service, rodeo clown, or WHATEVER that you can’t rely on third party, “free” service for your main online presence. It’s a relatively small investment to purchase a domain (less than $10) and host it (varies).

The best part? It’s YOUR site, that YOU own, and nobody can take it away from you.

Detroit Tigers photo via heidigoseek, rodeo clown via Bill Gracey.