January 22, 2006
Ning is unquestionably alive and well, a fact proven by their swift responses at TechCrunch, this blog, d2r and elsewhere. I’m not personally very excited about Ning, but clearly I’m not part of the target audience so it makes sense that I wouldn’t be on board.
What is their vision? The best description I found was from Mike Rowehl: “We want to make a new service, something that allows people who couldn’t get their application online before to easily clone and setup the site they want.”
Ning’s audience is Average I. User who knows nothing (or next to it) about code, and just wants a bookshelf or review app on their site. That’s a huge, untapped market (and one that doesn’t much care where their site is hosted). Ning is trying to bite off an awfully large chunk of the problem; I don’t doubt their ability but as I said before, things are moving very quickly these days and many of us recognize the same business opportunity.
Ning addresses the problem largely with cloning. Want a bookshelf? No problem, they’ve got one. Just click the “Clone this app” button and it’s yours. I’ve had more than a few frustrations trying to build my own apps on Ning, but cloning is as easy as it gets. To accomplish their vision, they’ll need to make customizations just that easy as well.
January 22, 2006 at 4:58 am
[...] Update: Ning responds. [...]
January 22, 2006 at 11:22 am
Thanks for reaffirming that we’re not dead yet.
“To accomplish their vision, they’ll need to make customizations just that easy as well.”
As a friend of mine often says: “Only completely.” We have a lot of work to do in this area, but we’ve been planning it for a long time too. In the next couple of weeks we’ll roll out new versions of our current example apps that use a new customisation framework - it’s not that big of an improvement in terms of changing functionality, but it gets beginners past the first hurdle with a lot of the look & feel stuff.
With regard to you not being the target audience: actually, I’d say that you’re much more of a target audience than you think. Sure, Ning doesn’t give you the same control that running your own server does, but at the same time it removes a whole lot of hassle and makes it simple to get a quick little project up and running, whether for you or (possibly much more often) for someone else.
But beyond simplicity, there’s a bigger deal. The reason I got so excited about Ning was that there are genuinely new app models here. The combination of the cross-app Content Store and user database, along with cloning, gives rise to some design patterns that weren’t really available before. This won’t be for everyone, nor applicable to every problem, but it does mean we’re good for more than just a few simple apps. The kinds of things I hope to see are going to take a while to get popular because they may rely on network effects, but there are already promising signs. Ning has a lot of genuinely innovative features that should be of interest to web developers at all levels.
(Sorry, that was a bit hand-wavy, but I’ll be writing in more details about these patterns soon. In the meantime, check David’s post from a couple of months back for a simple taster:
http://blog.ning.com/2005/10/sharing_data_with_the_content.html )
October 7, 2007 at 1:42 pm
free pre paid debit cards
doghouse classifiers bookstores decoupled stockades restore.