Ning - A Platform for Building Social Apps
The big questions im asking myself afer checking out Ning is "is this a significant app, or is it significant only in the fact that it's kinda fun?". Maybe being kinda fun is part of the point, being able to build social apps of the Flickr or Craigslist variety
from a web based toolkit not only puts Ning right on the top of the heap as the platform host, but may enable a lot of people to build on eachothers work and potentially create some amazing apps.
That all assumes it works wonderfully though. And at present i just don't know as they tell me it may take a little while for my beta developer account to be activated.
I can't say i was particularly impressed with the signup. After several tries i finally noticed the error message next to the username field, and upon successful signup was presented with a tagcloud full of broken links. Not exactly inspiring.
Jeff Clavier is optimistic but reserved:
So after being offered a large number of social media applications, we are now into the meta-framework to build social media applications. The notion is interesting: as we have come to expect that any consumer application will include some element of social networking, collaborative filtering, tagging, etc., Ning has the first shot at claiming platform status in the social phenomena by offering building consistent building blocks.
whilst Cory is a fair bit more upbeat
I really like its emphasis on cloning others' projects and then tweaking them to suit your own needs. It really reminds me of the old days of the Web, when you'd see something cool, View Source on the page to get how it was accomplished, paste it into your own page, and tweak it to your heart's content. That's how everyone learned to do everything, and it made for a fast revolution.
If they manage to iron out these annoying, embarrassing bugs pronto, and it lives up to public expectations of a Marc Andreesen stealth project, then we might see some interesting things from this one, but i'll hold judgement till i've had a chance to play, or at least to read some more from others who've taken time to take it for a spin.
Annoying is right
So I can't even open the home page without accepting a cookie? Nice.
a bubble
That's why I think this is another tech bubble. We're branding everything.