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."

Comments

Imposter Boy

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything you need to know is in this article.

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.

How many social websites are needed?

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Screw Andressen - he supports outsourcing

[mustafap]

Well if you spent more time working and less on slashdot, maybe you wouldn't be an outsourcing target?

CmdrTaco's dating profile...

[Afecks]

Interested in Meeting People for: Dating Men

Is somebody having a little fun with CmdrTaco?

Andreesen = synonymous with "failed business plan"

[cpuh0g]

Besides scoring alot of stock options when Netscape went public, has this guy ever done anything that has actually been a success?

I think every business he tried to start since leaving Netscape have bombed.

Color me unimpressed by lucky Mark's business acumen.

Re:Web development for dummies

[Bad to the Ben]

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).

Why? Didn't Netscape mostly disappear? Admittedly, it was more due to Netscape sucking and having their business model conquered by MS free giveaways than 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.

Don't count on it. The entire point of this "Ning" (stupid name) thing is to make it EASIER for other people to rip off existing social sites and start their own. IMHO and observations, the really innovative sites are developed by people using their own tools, because prepackaged sets like this one tend to limit what they can do to the preconceptions of whoever created the tools. Slashdot with it's "Slashcode" is a good example. Slashdot was innovative, but all the sites based off it aren't really. There are exceptions, of course.

Re:dating.ning.com very popular...

[It doesn't come easy]

"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."

Is "ning" slang for "genitals" in Chinese?

[CyricZ]

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"?

Re:Slashdot dating

[crschmidt]

Create an account. Apply for beta developer status. Click "Clone This" button on dating.ning.com. Type in that title, add a few extra fields ("What programming langugages do you know?" "Who is your ideal BOFH?")

It's that easy.

That's the power of cloning, and the primary force behind Ning.

Want Proof? I just did it: SlashDot Dating.

Interesting? Doubt it

[freddej]

The first blog comment on siliconbeat said it all:

"My first reaction, not knowing that this was an Andreesen site, was "gee, these apps are derivative". Come on, Bulldogster? And how many applications do we actually need to tell us about restaurants in Palo Alto?"

Breakthrough in Social Network

[wjzhu]

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.

The PHPNuke of social apps?

[horza]

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.

Re:The PHPNuke of social apps?

[OverlordQ]

Ning appears to be a social app framework written in PHP, hoping to do for social apps much what PHPNuke did for online magazines.

So we can expect 3-4 really bad security vulnerabilities a month till it reaches version 700000?

Everyone's missing the point

[Erisynne]

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.

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-time s-startup-launches

Re:Everyone's missing the point

[donnacha]

Hi Amy, having read both your blog post and Ning's voluminous FAQ, I see a major road-block to the series adoption of Ning as anything more than a playground, one that will see thousands of abandoned, short-lived experiments - a sort of sourceforge of social websites.

That road-block is money: the admins, who are expected to invest time energy in tailoring their Ning-based websites to their target audience and then generating enough buzz/awareness to build the necessary momentum and userbase to actually make their websites useful, are not allowed to include any adverts because Andreessen & Co will already be inserting ads and explain that "don't look warmly upon more than one person running ads on an App or a page".

The real zinger, however, is that they helpfully suggest that you integrate Paypal and charge for your service. It's not hard to see that most apps that build any traction will turn to this option as the only way to gain some reward for their efforts and, obviously, to build a wall around their service/retain exclusive value, will default to tag their data as "private", killing the whole shared data eco-system concept.

I found your Rails articles a few months ago interesting, I'm surprised that you don't considered that a much better route for anyone with the imagination to invent new Web apps.

Oh dear, oh deeeeear!

[Quiet_Desperation]

I dunno. I get a "danger will robinson" reaction to that thought, and my tail gets all bushy.

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.

Ming's too restrictive.

[Anthony Boyd]

we don't let you run your own ads from third party ad networks, such as Google AdSense

Poof! Widespread adoption peters out right there.