Michael Arrington smacks Ning, appropriately in my view, for… well, basically for not cutting it. As I see it, they’ve released an app that would have been really, really cool in 2003. But now, with thousands of programmers-turned-entrepreneurs realizing they can do business better than their former bosses, and frameworks like Ruby on Rails enabling them to move at unprecedented speed, a gated PHP5 application is met with little more than grunts and hand-wavy gestures.

Things are moving very, very fast these days.

Update: Ning responds.