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(Let Me preface by saying details in this entry are linked to sources and much of this blog are my own thoughts, concerns and opinion )
It’s made headlines with tech crunch, been championed on Twitter and seems to be the talk of the Technology community lately. What is it? A new service called The Grid, which is set to launch in Late Spring 2015.
The premises of the service, currently being offered at a pre-launch price of $96 USD a year (discounted from the $300 USD cost once launched) is the promise of Artificial Intelligence based Web Design. The claim being that all a user has to do is input their Copy and images and the Grid’s engine will crop photos, generate correct SEO protocols and format code to create you’re Website. The more info you feed it the more it tunes your Website, at least that is what is promised.
Being curious about things, after a story crossed my radar in the News 360 app, I started to look into what the company is promising and the possibility of this working.
The thing is though, and keep in mind here everything I state in this entry is simply My opinion on things, I’m left with some serious misgivings and doubts about things.
The first things that happened to instantly be a concern for Me is that the service does not have anything that a potential end user could inspect to be more comfortable with their promised offering, the only example of the results of their design engine’s results is their company website. No demo version, no proof of execution video where the user can see copy being inputted into the engine and code generated output being produced, nothing!
Next, there are the details like the company promoting that sites would be held in Cloud based servers, which then brings up the question of just how secure the information would be for me.
Things cascade even into more concerns as I notice that the “AI” Interface they are selling this service on is optional and can be turned off if the user has their own knowledge of Web Design code. This brings up the question of “If it’s optional, why would I pay X amount of money a year when I could use a free service like Wix.com ?”
Questions for Myself continued along as I found Myself thinking “Well what about using PHP? Javascript? Python? Ruby?” and “Will the AI Engine allow for personal changes, or is a user looking at this thing going ‘I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you do that’?”
There is also the detail that every User’s content is housed on the service Github (Wikipedia Entry), which is a popular source for the sharing of code based projects. does this mean any context for a user’s project with The Grid potentially is only as secure as the policies Github outlines here?
Having looked over theTerms of Service and (Privacy Policies Privacy Policy) of The Grid’s website, even more things started to concern me, like I do not see anything that protects the user in regards to an arbitrary removal of their data, as The Grid can terminate an account at their discretion, upon that termination it is said that your data is instantly removed from the servers.
Termination can also be triggered through things like the, in my opinion, vaguely worded references to “Excessively frequent requests to the Grid via the API” in their documentation.
Throw in the details that users have to waive their legal rights towards recovery of fees and damages by a third party, grant The Grid a all encompassing license to allow the use of derivative performance and promotion of the user’s content without the user receiving any royalties of content that The Grid says the user still owns and there being a zero refund policy even though the company is promoting a get your subscription fee credited for referring three additional users policy and in my opinion this service falls under too good to be true.
Oh and Bandwidth usage that is considered “significantly exceeds” could also see one’s account terminated, but that begs the question of what is meant by “significantly exceeds”?
Could this service be of use, possible, but to whom might be a tough sell in my opinion.
