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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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