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Marc Andreessen's Social Platform: Ning
An anonymous reader writes "As reported on SiliconBeat, Marc Andreessen has finally lifted the covers off his latest project: an applications structure called Ning, which makes the development of social websites like thefacebook.com and match.com more accessible. See TheGlu and Dating for examples of Ning in action."
Netscape always controlled the media when it came to the story about how the browser was first built. This is the only article that I've ever seen that actually went back to the place where it was created to find out the real story.
History is written by the victors.... Even if that "history" isn't true.
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There is a very comprehensive FAQ section on the Ning Homepage. Ning appears to be a social app framework written in PHP, hoping to do for social apps much what PHPNuke did for online magazines. It uses its own template language XNHTML, but it's not like developers aren't expected to learn a new one each week these days. It makes it easy to click-and-clone apps, much like Blogger makes it easy to set up your own blog. The business plan is to try and offer a premium service and make money off the back of that. They are clear that you own and code and content that you write, but don't have any license I can see of the framework itself. This is something I'd like to see be made clear. I'd be wary developing something where the rug could be pulled out from under me.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
My company was contracted to work on Ning, and we've been doing it for over 3 months. It makes me a bit sad that everyone seems to be missing the point of what makes Ning truly great.
e s-startup-launches
It's the data. The SHARED data. It's an ecosystem, not just a platform or a hosted framework. Ning is much greater than any individual application, and I personally don't think that the true popularity will come from the dating applications. Ning's much bigger than any given application (and by that I mean piece of software and application as in "the way it's used"), and it's not a mega app. It's an app playground.
See my blog post on the subject: http://www.slash7.com/articles/2005/10/05/fun-tim
---- My Design, Code, Ruby on Rails blog: http://www.slash7.com/
I think he started LoudCloud
Went big (as in dot com big) - sold off the European department to EDS.
Changed directions of LoudCloud and it is making some money - at least last time I checked.
He knows what investors are looking for and he has the skill the find good people and hire them. Good people and good investment money usally means you can make big coin... but not always.
The Shanghiers speak, amazingly enough, Shanghaiese (Shanghaihua in Mandarin (lit. "Shanghai Speech")).
:) )
Being a tonal language, "ning" could mean any number of things. The excellent hanzi dictionary, zhongwen.com lists six different meanings for "ning". It is important to note that zhongwen uses standard Mandarin (putonghua) pronouciation and not Shanghaiese. How much variation there is between the two I don't know. The only thing even close to slang for testicles is "lemons", and I doubt that's right. I would think iit was a proper noun.
FWIW standard Mandarin is really close to what is spoken in Beijing, but not exactly. Beijingers tend to end some words with 'r'. (e.g. "dian" becomes "diar" ("a little bit" or "hour") and kinda flat-vowel/whine some other words (e.g. "na" becomes "nei", "zhe" becomes "zhei" ("this" and "that")). When I asked my Chinese (meaning both the foriegn language and the nationality) TA about it, she said "You want to use the standard Mandarin. You don't want to sound like you're from Beijing!" When asked why, she said, "They're stuck up. Like New Yorkers." I said it was fine with me, as long as I didn't sound like a hick.
Ni de zhongwen ke jieshu le. (Hopefully that says, "Your Chinese lesson has ended."