I've been reading about the Ning vs. WidgetLaboratory drama on TechCrunch. The meat of the conflict seems to be that widgets from WidgetLaboratory were so degrading the user experience of Ning that they had to be cut off. The relevant excerpts from the most recent TechCrunch story on the war of words are below
For those of you not closely following the drama between social network platform Ning and a popular widget provider called WidgetLaboratory, you can read the background here. On Friday Ning unceremoniously shut down their access to Ning, making all those widgets vanish. ... In an email to WL on August 2 (more than three weeks ago), CEO Gina Bianchini wrote “Our only goal is to have you build your products in such a way that doesn’t slow down the networks running your products or takedown the Ning Platform with what you’re doing. Both of those would result in us needing to shutdown WidgetLaboratory products and that’s has never been our first choice of options. Hopefully, you know this after 8 months of working with us.”
Ignoring the he said, she said nature of the communication between both companies, there is a legitimate concern that 3rd party widgets included on the pages of a Web site can degrade the performance to the extent that the site becomes unusably slow. In fact, TechCrunch has had similar problems with 3rd party widgets as Mike Arrington has mentioned on his personal blog which led to him excluding the widgets from his site.
Typically, widgets are embedded in a site by including references to Javascript hosted on a 3rd party site in the page's HTML. This means rendering the page is dependent on how quickly the script files can be downloaded from the 3rd party site AND how long it takes for the script to execute especially since it may also fetch data from one or more servers as well. Thus a slow server or a badly written script can make every page that embeds the widget unbearably slow to render. Given that the ability to embed widgets is a key feature of social networking sites, it is important for such sites to figure out how to isolate their user experience from badly written widgets or widgets hosted on slow Web servers.
Below are some best practices that have emerged on how social networking sites can immunize themselves from the kinds of problems Ning has had with WidgetLaboratory
Host the Scripts Yourself: If you have a popular site, it is quite likely that you have more resources to handle lots of page views than the typical widget developer. Thus it makes sense to take away the dependency on externally hosted scripts by hosting the widgets yourself. Microsoft encourages developers to submit their gadgets to Windows Live Gallery if they want to build gadgets for my.live.com or Windows Live Spaces. For it's AJAX homepage service, Google does not require developers to submit gadgets to them for hosting but instead caches gadget data for hours at a time which means they are effectively hosting the gadgets themselves for the majority of the accesses by their users.
Keep External Dependencies off of Pages that Need to Render Quickly: In many cases, it isn't feasible to host all of the data and content related to widgets that are being shown on your site. In that case, you should ensure that the key scenarios on your Web site are insulated from the problems caused by slow or broken 3rd party widgets. For example, on Facebook viewing someone's profile is a key part of the user experience that is important to make sure happens as quickly and as smoothly as possible. For this reason, Facebook caches all 3rd party content that shows up on a user's profile and requires applications to call Profile.SetFBML to add content to the profile instead of providing a way to directly embed widgets on a user's profile.
Make It Clear Who Is to Blame if Things go Awry: One of the issues raised by Ning in their conflict with WidgetLaboratory is that user pages wouldn't render correctly or would show degraded performance due to WidgetLaboratory's widgets but Ning would get the support calls. This kind of user confusion is avoided if the user experience makes it clear when the failure of a page to render correctly is the fault of the external widget and when it is part of the hosting site. For example, Facebook Canvas Pages for applications make it clear that the user is using a 3rd party application and not part of the core Facebook experience. I've seen lots of user complain about the slowness of Scrabulous and Scrabble but never seen anyone who thought that Facebook was to blame and not the application developers.
Following some of these practices would have saved Ning and its users some of their current grief.
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