OneBigWeb

Published On: October 24th, 2005  

I spent some time looking at Ning. What is Ning?

Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for people to build and run social applications. Social “apps” are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.

Think flickr and delicious. The faq offers more details.

Most of the focus in the blogosphere has been on how Ning enables the long tail of social software development by drastically reducing the costs associated with developing social apps. Ning offers free hosting along with allowing developers to create apps by cloning an existing app and adapting it. The assumption is that hundreds of apps will emerge, each catering to a small niche.

But what makes Ning particularly novel is the shared content store. A app can access and use any content created by any other app running on Ning. The app creating the content does not have to explicitly publish the content as a web service, but simply has to put it into the content store and mark it as public. The content is accessed using the Ning API which allows for querying the content store in a flexible manner.

So for example, one could create a app dedicated to city reviews by pulling together and reformatting data from a photo-sharing app, a restaurant review app and a bookmarks app. Further more, the app could highlight any zipcodes associated with the photos or restaurants in a fully integrated google map!

It is this aspect of Ning that makes it the perfect microcosm of the Web2.0 paradigm of webservices and mashups. The low cost of entry will ensure that Ning will quickly have lots of independently developed apps intertwined in myriad ways. The big question is whether the whole that emerges will be much greater than the sum of its parts.

See also,
Chris Schmidt and David Sklar who have worked on Ning, write about the shared content store.
Alex Barnett of Microsoft describes Ning’s value proposition.

Update : Marc Andreessen from Ning has posted a comment.

Update : Check out this post on Ning’s key failing.
Marc Andreessen Says:
October 25th, 2005 at 11:49 am e Hi — yup, that’s right — there’s a huge amount of flexibility in how apps can query and consume one another’s content, and more to come. One great example on the system today is Ning Pets, which is a parent app that aggregates content from lots of “child” apps including Bulldogster, Muttster, etc. (think Friendster for your pet).

Best,
Marc
harishkm Says:
October 26th, 2005 at 1:07 am eThanks for that response Marc!Its great to have Marc Andreessen be the first to post a comment on this blog! As Alex Barnett reminds us on his blog, markets are conversations, and the folks at Ning do seem to enjoy joining the conversation.

Ning clearly has ambitions of being a major platform. That brings up some interesting questions. Questions which I hope to explore in future posts on this blog.