Early Discussion
The early conversation around the Ning launch has been great. Checking out the ning tag at del.icio.us (429 people bookmarked the site as of this writing) or Technorati search for ning or Feedster search for ning turns up a whole bunch of posts. Here are some of the ones that call out the peices that I’m really jazzed about:
Being able to pick up other peoples apps to clone and customize them right on the playground really gets me excited. We’ve already seen a ton of innovative and interesting work with open source web applications, and hopefully this will take it to the next level by lowering the activation energy for a developer even further. Previously if someone saw a great bit of open source and thought “Wow, my school/club/social network/church/cult/communist cell/support group could really use one of those apps” they would have to put some effort into finding a place to host the application, bandwidth, installation and configuration, etc. What we’re trying to do is collapse all of that into a single step. So that the decision to use an application you see on Ning is immediately followed by customizing that application for your users and not doing valueless infrastructure work. It looks like a lot of the folks out there picked up on that really quickly.