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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."
Maybe someone can be createive and come up with some useful applications for it.
theGLU is taking a short break. Back later!
liqbase
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.
So, uhm, where is the "Chicks for Sysadmins/C Programmers" section?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Sorry, I just can't take Marc Andressen seriously.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This seems like the sort of market where perhaps one or two major sites is all that is needed. First of all, you'll get the widest slice of the community with only a few major providers, rather than a few hundred smaller, more specific sites with a far smaller proportion of the population subscribed.
So while there could be a site for UNIX aficionados, and another for horse lovers, it'd be difficult to find somebody interested in both UNIX and horses when the smaller, specific sites are common. Both people could be listed in the more general, and larger, site. And thus it'd be easier to query for those interested in both UNIX and horses at once.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Looks like a great way for folks who don't know much about the underlying tech to experiment with web apps. Best part of it is you can take any existing application, clone it, and you instantly have the start of a new app that you can customize.
It's cool to hear Andreessen is behind it; this gives it a little more legitimacy than it would otherwise have (ie, less likely to disappear thanks to not having a business model).
The innovation is in new stuff, not in ripoffs of existing sites.. will be interesting to watch whether Ning will really make this possible.
Well if you spent more time working and less on slashdot, maybe you wouldn't be an outsourcing target?
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Interested in Meeting People for: Dating Men
Is somebody having a little fun with CmdrTaco?
I get a redirect loop on all three web sites. Are they Internet-Explorer-only, or what?
I think every business he tried to start since leaving Netscape have bombed.
Color me unimpressed by lucky Mark's business acumen.
Shit, time to start picking up RoR then.. http://nwc.linuxpipeline.com/showArticle.jhtml?art icleID=171201940
Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
Looks like he's hit upon the next great business plan for web sites -- getting geeks hitched! No but seriously, social networking probably is going to be a mushrooming web-based industry, but so far, I haven't seen a lot of imagination given to how one can meet and extend one's social network online. The last great revolution in this sphere was Instant Messaging/Text Messaging, which has seriously taken off Europe and Asia (and to a lesser degree in the US). But as far as web sites go, I haven't seen anything that's really revolutionary or that provides something that Orkut, and other social networking or Dating sites don't already give you.
duh, here's the link to the product's website:
www.ning.com
"This is a test of the Emergency Dating System. The geeks of your area in voluntary cooperation with the Federal, State and local authorities have developed this system to give you hope in the unlikely event of an actual dating opportunity. If this had been an actual dating situation, the search results you just experienced would have been followed by the epiphany that no person of the female persuasion would even consider using such a system for dating in the first place, so you're wasting your time. This concludes this test of the Emergency Dating System."
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I'm not sure what dialect of Chinese they speak in Shanghai, but when I was there for business several years back I do recall seeing an incident involving the word "ning".
I think there were some young adults playing football (soccer, for you American folk) on a side street, and one of them got kicked in his genitals. I recall his friends yelling "NING! repeatedly. Does "ning" refer to the genitals themselves, or is it just part of a Chinese phrase used when genital injuries occur? Is it like the "kicked" in "You just got kicked in the nuts!" or is it the "nuts"?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Thank goodness for this - "Hot or Not" was just not fulfilling the needs of my online social group. A specialized version is just what we needed!
So how the heck do they think they're going to profit from this? So now every single person on planet earth with an Internet connection can create their own social networking website. That just made all these websites worthless.
This whole Web 2.0 thing is a huge bubble. Everyday a new, supposedly Web 2.0 app comes out. Out of all these apps, do they think they'll be able to capture a large audience? All they get is 15 minutes of fame and then die out sitting in the corner of the Internet collecting dust. VCs are throwing their money as if these websites are going to be make money for them, and we all know most of them won't.
I don't know who here agrees with me, but I'm sure many people out there do.
The best musicians may not build their own instruments, and the best film makers and photographers may not build their own cameras. Currently social network sites are created only by those with significant technical ability. Now with Ning, the tools are built and ready for social-artists to use: people with great social-IQ can develop some amazing social webtools that we may not yet imagined.
I posted about Ning yesterday:
http://www.krazydad.com/
An excerpt:
Ning allows user/authors to set up permanent URLs to their apps, which take the form XXXX.ning.com. I imagine there will be a bit of an initial landgrab as cybersquatters grab up some of the more obvious ones. It would be nice if Ning had a policy in place to deal with this, but I imagine, with a project this ambitious, their plates are pretty full -- and this leads to what I think is the most flawed aspect of this idea -- it's just too damn big. If successful, Ning has the potential to be a host, provider, authoring tool, and community hub for a huge chunk of web content. The question is, can the company successfully do all these things and do them well? Managing successful communities is a tricky business, and the downside is that when the users get pissed off, you've already provided them with an excellent channel for mouthing off about it (for the inevitable whiners, this is an excellent time to reserve "ihate.ning.com" and "ilovewhi.ning.com").
Thank goodness FEMA wasn't dispatched...someone that hopeful might just assume it's an abbreviation for FEMALE.
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
There is one good reason for wanting to know where speed cameras are, even if you keep within the law: a significant proportion of cameras go up at danger spots. Knowing that this point is likely to be dangerous is helpful, even if you don't speed (the worst case is that it's more dangerous because a certain class of speeding loon likes to brake as hard as possible when they're near a speed camera, crawl past at less than half the limit, then flat out away from it).
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
Hey! you forgot to mention everyones favorite GPL orkut-like social tool: Yogurt
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/
You might have at least clicked on a bloody advert while you were looking, you insensitive clod!
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I checked it out yesterday and finally got one of theor limited developer accounts. So far it's kind of neat. I was able to clone a "this or that" type app and set it up to answer the age old question:
Which is the coolest? Robots, Aliens, Pirates or Ninjas?
Check it out.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
This seems like just another company offering to be the engine for lots of dating sites.
What we really want, if our goal is interoperability, is something similar to the FoaF project's RDF description framework for describing people, then using technology to match them up.
In fact, using something like FoaF, we can describe people in more than the "29 dimensions of compatibility"- we can look at things like interests, where they blog, geography, etc.
We're already so divided and conquered and fractured. Specialized dating sites may cause all the politico/ideologico groups to start exclusively inbreeding until we're just a disconnected sea of tribes that don't even speak the same language.
I'm being silly, but only a little.
Autopr0n is, like, down and stuff.
Yeah, man, for like a year now. God I miss you. What the hell happened -- Thousands of horny geeks' underwear have just begun to dry out, and they need some relief. You took down your page, I stopped writing sex in Thailand stories... What's the world coming to?
Put identity in the browser.
In actually signing up real and attractive people to actually date. That part of "Social Engineering" is beyond the scope of the Internet.
The difference is that who'll probably be able to support more than 3 users.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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.
Can you spell it out?
Great, just what the world needs. MORE web sites for people looking to cheat on their significant others.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
This is from faded memory and no doubt wrong in particulars, but the general drift is more or less correct ... I hope!
Way back, 100 years ago, AT&T played very rough. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of independent telephone systems. They were so independent as to even have different voltages and other vital specs. Yet somehow they managed to work with each other. AT&T began a buying spree, and if some local indepenent telco did not want to sell out to AT&T, they would refuse to connect, citing various bogus technical reasons, and eventually the local telco would be so isolated that they would have to capitulate. Eventually AT&T bought up enough to become the master of the telco universe, by which time the stink finally began to reach the federals and they started making noises. AT&T then offered to become federally regulated in exchange for keeping their ill-gotten monopoly.
This was born the myth that the telephone system is a natural monopoly.
Infuriate left and right
>Your Search
You searched for 21 - 29 year old females.
No matching profiles.
Yes, but some of us are at work behind a firewall which blocks coral cache. It may seem *nice* to the people behind the site, but to those of us on slashdot who actually work in the corperate sector appreciate the straight links which work for everyone, and not to just a limited few.
click me
Poof! Widespread adoption peters out right there.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
He can always blame it on Microsoft again.
I mean excuse me for a second here. I've seen no mention of Drupal. If you are talking about social software and framworks no less why is this better than Drupal? Who is the comunity that is going to develop this along the same lines as Drupal and Civicpace etc?... What am i missing?
A friend of a friend was strongly involved in this, so I've had so time to look into it. First off, social networking based apps strongly benefit from a shared userbase and a shared tag library. Ning provides both to an developer. Well structured apps also get the benefit of sharing data, such as pets.ning.com, where all pets are aggregated, but anyone can make a site geared toward a specific breed. Not only to you build a closer community, but every new entry added at your specialized app adds value to the aggregate. There is a set of content types (pictures, discussion posts, people profiles, etc.) that nearly app could reuse, thus offering a huge benefit from this structure.
The biggest issue I see is usability for the consumer. The framework provides an impressive backend, but most of the frontend (HTML/PHP) is handled by the individual app developers. Every app is likely to look and act completely different.
While I do see this being a repository of abandoned apps, the Ning Pivot page should keep only the most active prominent. Someone compared it to Sourceforge, but despite the majority of apps that never got past planning, sourceforge remains useful to a huge number of projects. Same thing applies here.
I do see a namespace problem creeping in, both for app namespaces and content type name spaces. Sharing the data structures is going to get tricky, being both distributed and decentralized development platform.
With Yahoo's recent spending spree on Web2.0 (flickr.com, upcoming.net, etc.) this will be an interesting competitor. Can Ning "open source" mentality of app building really allow the community to build a better picture database? Will 24HL be able to focus on developer support and a foundational library while Yahoo is dedicating teams to every section?
Anm
So I create a Ning developer beta account and sign in, and happen to scroll the page down to the bottom just to see what's there. Lo and behold, in big orange-brown letters in the Featured Apps section, I see "Got MILF?" as a featured site.
I didn't realize Liv Tyler had a kid. Don't worry, other than the name it appears worksafe.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
I'm interested in talking to you more about this. Email mgkimsal at gmail.com with some more thoughts. Thanks.
creation science book
if there is no NCSA work to rip off, how will it be any good?
-pyrrho
If there are alternatives, it's a bad idea to build any kind of revenue making site that depends in an essential way on software and/or infrastructure provided by a small startup.
Are there alternatives? As far as I can tell, there are. In fact, a general purpose content management system like Drupal already has a lot of "social networking" features, and they are open and server-to-server. I see no compelling reason to put Ning in the loop for something like that.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
So the connection'll be obvious if I watch the movie, then?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.