Phew, Ning is meme-du-jour. It’s basically a web toolkit to create social software. It’s the first product I’ve seen to come out of Marc Andreesen’s stealth startup 24 Hour Laundry. (reference)
My hunch might be wrong, but it seems to be web2.0 applied to raw application development. What I mean is this: the typical read-write-web facilitates user-contributed data, and the social sharing of user-contributed data. Ning looks like it facilitates user-contributed code, and the social sharing of user-contributed code.
And, by providing a good development platform, it encourages mash-ups between applications, data-sharing, etc. I am curious if this enablement is just inward-focused or also outward-focused. That is, is it just as easy to API into a Ning app from another webapp outside Ning as it is for one Ning app to talk to another?
I’ll be able to tell more after I get my beta developer account, which according to Gordon should be “any hour now” =p.
But, wow, this looks like it could be the sandbox to end all sandboxen.
Update: ahh, here is the business model (i.e. where the money’s gonna come from):
the third party ad networks such as Google AdSense don’t look warmly upon more than one person running ads on an App or a page. Hence the trade for running apps on Ning is that we offer free app creation, management, hosting, security, and shared services, and – in return – you open your code to inspire other developers and refrain from running third party ads. We totally understand if this is not for everybody.