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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."
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 think every business he tried to start since leaving Netscape have bombed.
Color me unimpressed by lucky Mark's business acumen.
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.
"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.
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-- Christopher Schmidt YouTube Quality of Experience
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.
Once Google's Orkut comes out of beta, oh, man. It'll be like Friendster and Tribe and OKCupid and BDSMPartnerSearch.com.au all put together but with amazingly leet JavaScript.
But it won't be evil.
For more information, click here.
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 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.
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.
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.
Poof! Widespread adoption peters out right there.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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?