« Integrating Writeboard and Backpack | Main | iTunes Videos »
October 04, 2005
Ning: The future just happened
Holy shit is the best response to Ning, the result of sooper-secret startup 24 Hour Laundry. Ning is the next-most-meta step for this Web 2.0 thing: an environment (tool? product?) for building new web 2.0 applications and mashups. Imagine taking classified listings Craigslist-style, Google Maps, tags, and combining those quickly with no programming. Even more interesting, if you see another Ning app, you can “clone” it as the basis for your own modifications, which you can then release as an application in its own right.
But with great power, as they say… Here’s my concern: Ning encourages you to build “Social apps” like del.icio.us or Flickr. In other words, the sort of “architecture of participation” applications that get more useful the more they’re used. What will be the effect of unleasing perhaps dozens of these applications at once, with the ability to clone more of them? It’ll take a real breakthrough idea to really generate the level of community interest to get momentum going around any of them.
That might not be the real value here, though. What happens when it’s easy to build a piece of situated software for a group of 30 people to use for a few days? Maybe Ning’s value is in building temporary applications, whose data is open enough to migrate elsewhere, when that small community evaporates. From the developer’s point of view, Ning also seems like a perfect prototyping tool, especially considering the busywork of account management and so on is handled for you.
Update: someone named Scott Mike wrote almost exactly the same thing here here, even pointing to the same Shirky essay I did.
Posted by Andrew at October 4, 2005 02:26 PM