A trackback from Marc (thanks!), led to some good posts on Ning:
Lucas Gonze: Social software for developing social software
Kevin Burton's Feed Blog: 24 Hour Laundry (Ning) Launches - Expect Scalability Problems
Om Malik’s Broadband Blog - Ning, the real 24 Hour Laundry
Software Only: The 24 Hour Laundry has closed, and is replaced by Ning
Anything Else: ning: My Thoughts
SiliconBeat: Andreessen's Ning unveiled
And, as always, TechDirt nails it: "This raises one big question: the core value of most social application is in whether or not it can build a real community. eBay, Craigslist, Flickr, del.icio.us and others really succeeded because of the communities they built, rather than just the technology. Thus, the idea of having lots of people easily creating new social applications might not seem too appealing. Those apps are pretty much worthless without the community, right? It might be a useful way to rapidly prototype a new app, but can it turn into something more? Actually... it might. If you start to think about it more as social situated software, suddenly the idea becomes a lot more interesting. The idea of situated software is that it serves a specific need for a specific (often very small) group of people. It doesn't need to scale. It just needs to serve that group." -Techdirt:Build Your Own Social Apps?
So is Ning essentially a glorified Web 2.0 HyperCard (the old Apple Macintosh app that "made everyone a programmer")? Even though there were many apps that could be built on top of HyperCard, "serious" programmers did not build "serious" applications with it...
Also, each of the above examples (eBay, Craigslist, Flickr, del.icio.us) have many many subtle but real differences in how their systems, rules, and community were built that enabled and empowered their communities of users to build something unique and valuable.
Having generic tools that can make a generic copy of some Web 2.0 success stories is still very much missing the essence and soul of what makes those examples so remarkable.
And while the generic concept of Ning is very very very cool ("give users the tools and platform to build stuff"), this smells way too much like "let's be the next Microsoft® by trying to lock users into our fabulous new and shiny Stealth 2000 Web 2.0 OS Platform®."
If Ning had "just" been an open source library of tested and interoperable code to make it easier for people to "roll their own" it would have been a very different story, but that, of course, would have none of the "sexy business model lock-in possibilities" - which is also the exact same huge reason why the odds are strongly against a "serious" app ever being built on it - as other options are still relatively cheap, easy, quick, potentially "monetizable" through AdSense and the like, and, most importantly, come with no implicit platform lock-in...
It is surprising that none of the above bloggers address this last point - or is it not an issue for anyone else?
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