source: greyeyesgabriel facebook notes
I am getting rather fed up with start-ups that offer great features on a free platform; only to restrict those features a year or two later when their user base grows, in an attempt to drive more people into paid platforms. I am seriously considering moving all of my main websites to Google Sites; not only would my sub-domain be associated with the largest web company, ensuring indexing by Google; but it would also allow me to use my Google Webmaster and Google Analytics codes without paying a hosting company hundreds of dollars a year just to be able to claim ownership and track my own websites. If I want to make it a social platform, all I have to do is add in Google Groups to the integration. I find it interesting how many people look at Google as a threat and want to take them down; yet Google started as, and still remains to be an open source community where you can find any information about web design and development, tutorials for coding, software, and just about anything else you need to know; as well as development tools all for free. Everything Google touches turns to gold; YouTube, Feedburner, Android, and the list goes on and on. Google is even developing cars that drive themselves with much success; no wonder people want to take down the Google giant, they have become the largest by providing resources and information for free!
I am getting rather fed up with start-ups that offer great features on a free platform; only to restrict those features a year or two later when their user base grows, in an attempt to drive more people into paid platforms. I am seriously considering moving all of my main websites to Google Sites; not only would my sub-domain be associated with the largest web company, ensuring indexing by Google; but it would also allow me to use my Google Webmaster and Google Analytics codes without paying a hosting company hundreds of dollars a year just to be able to claim ownership and track my own websites. If I want to make it a social platform, all I have to do is add in Google Groups to the integration. I find it interesting how many people look at Google as a threat and want to take them down; yet Google started as, and still remains to be an open source community where you can find any information about web design and development, tutorials for coding, software, and just about anything else you need to know; as well as development tools all for free. Everything Google touches turns to gold; YouTube, Feedburner, Android, and the list goes on and on. Google is even developing cars that drive themselves with much success; no wonder people want to take down the Google giant, they have become the largest by providing resources and information for free!
Smaller companies just can't compete while offering their great features for free; they begin to struggle to please investors, or pay for exccess bandwidth, and begin to try to push their free users into paid platforms, then the free traffic leaves and the focus becomes getting the paid customers to pay more; this is what ends up leading to the failure of great startups with solid platforms. This is why I am pleased that I don't have investors involved in my startup; I would rather succeed or fail on my own merit without investors that have sunk millions of dollars into my platform expecting immediate returns, that's just not how it works in the real virtual reality! It takes years to build a platform, while earning the trust of your customers; the last thing a company would want to do is betray that trust and go back on promises made when they had first started with their fresh ideas and eagerness to take over the world, or at least the virtual world. Companies like Webs (formerly freewebs), Ning, and other resource providers for webmasters have fell victim to this type of practice and now some of the newer companies that were startups only a few years ago are making the same mistakes; there is a reson that all of these "free" developers flocked to your site in the first place, mostly because you offered the most control for those hidden codes that developers depend upon to show the search engines ownership and provide developers with the analytics data that they require to know where their traffic is coming from and other statistics that are vital to the development of our websites and networks.
The value is not in your features and what you can provide; the value is in the control of the website. As a developer, if I can not claim ownership of the site within my Google Webmaster account; or if I can't track my traffic to my website, then your service just depreciated to the point of me looking for a new service that will allow me to have that control. It is a slap in the face to me for you to say that you get to own my creative work after all of the time I have invested in developing it on your platform and telling everyone I know about your great service! Yes; I have severed ties with companies because of this type of practice, but at least I know that if I go with Google, it will be the last time I will ever have to move my hosting because of coding issues and ownership. Perhaps these startups need to remember who it was that made their service so popular in the first place; it's those developers that joined your free platform that told their friends, who told their friends, and so on; it's called viral advertising and it is the oldest form of advertising on the planet, also the most dependable and profitable. If you earn the trust of your customers, then you earn a client for life.
This note started as a comment to my status; "I find it interesting that everyone wants to compete with Google; yet they aren't open source companies that offer the best control and ownership for developers, for free!" But after I got going, I decided it was better suited for a note.
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