It all started out with a lot of promise, with the expected start up warts. It took forever for NING to get features like assignable moderators – a staple of any open source forum software you’ve been able to run yourself for years. There was a fairly active Network Creator community and even a third party add-on market.

But a progressive disease took hold – one that affected both free network customers and premium customers a like.  Network Creators starting getting less and less news about what to expect. NING implemented a digital goods system that was automatically turned on – on all sites, including pay sites. Being able to send your buddies a digital bunny works on some communities, but not on more serious communities such as those that bring together people who are fighting for their lives against cancer.

Not only were pay network creators getting their communities hijacked by NING, but also NING did its best to avoid actually interacting with their customers. NING moved their support and customer feedback to another company, then when threaded comments became heated and customers shared specific concerns, those threaded comments would then get deleted. This seems a little odd considering NING is a social network system company – that doesn’t even use its own software to work with its own customers, and solves problems by deleting them.

Some of the changes they have announced may well improve NING’s bottom line in the short term, but the delivery of the message doesn’t entirely build confidence. New CEO Jason Rosenthal made the effort to address concerns directly with NING customers through their updated Network Creator site and states that a transition plan will be shared with NING customers within the next two weeks. That’s much better than the copy-pasted message from Mark Andreessen or the piles of congratulatory text addressed to departed CEO Gina Bianchini, who clearly left the company in its current predicament.

CEO Jason Rosenthal is off to a good start by simply listening to his paying customers.  Now if he can keep NING from undermining the very premise of his business ecosystem, NING may have a chance at a comeback.

Over the course of the 2007, Trend Micro seemed to do exactly what I wanted it to do, though its pop up is more intrusive than Panda Anti-Virus but less so than Kasparsky. What I thought was a very clever feature though of Trend Micro though was built in support for chat support! While many anti-virus companies demand a credit card before talking with you, here is a feature to connect you to a live person to solve your problems when you need it. Too bad it doesn’t work.

You see – about the time that Trend Micro began to give me pop ups that it was only 60+ days left until renewal, it stopped downloading virus patten updates. The log files simply showed that it was unable to connect and suggested an internet connection problem. Nope, no problem there. So I thought this would be the perfect time to try the chat service! Trend Micro thoughtfully placed the chat initialization button right into the side of the main console. I fired this up, filled in my customer information, and started the session.

A minute after the session started, I received a note back asking me to wait for a customer service representative. Another minute – a “Thank you for waiting. A customer service representative will be with you shortly” message appeared. Five minutes later – a follow up message”The session has ended!”. Ill give them a day before we install Panda and replace Trend Micro.

What should be a major selling point of Trend Micro Internet Security – an innovative feature in customer engagement – defeats itself by not following through. Their system is capable of accepting customer feedback of course. There is a valuable lesson here – don’t implement a new, key feature unless you have the bandwidth to follow through and do it right.