Michael Arrington on Ning -- RIP?

Michael asks, whatever happened to Ning?

[from TechCrunch » Ning - R.I.P.? ]

The idea of Ning, which launched in October 2005, is brilliant. Let people easily create social applications tailored with difference web services. Allow others to clone those applications and take the code from them directly into whatever they are building instead of building from scratch. Watch everything evolve as better and better stuff gets built, which in turn is used to build even better stuff. Ning leverages the platform by aggregating the applications and selling advertising and premium tools/features. But the reality of Ning is that it’s lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when they finally do roll out better functionality.

Michael details the mistakes: requires too much programming skill, key APIs not supported, closed world model, and bad branding (the conflict between Ning and 24hourLaundry).

This looks like a textbook case study, perhaps... but on the other hand I think maybe things are just moving too fast right now for someone to get out ahead of the development frenzy in the Web 2.0 space to be able to provide a foundation like Ning is supposed to be. Too early, too much innovation, and not enough convergence on how these apps are supposed to be configured.

Even if Ning could develop something equivalent to a Hypercard or a Lotus Notes for Web 2.0, where building special-purpose apps is relatively straightforward, I wonder if that is going to be that much of a much. On one hand, Notes has a big corporate base, but as I argued a few weeks back in a post at Get Real, Notes and its apps have had only a minimal impact on the larger world of consumer technology. Ditto Hypercard.

I think the toe-stub around Ning is conceptual: sharing the core aspects of social applications is sensible, but building a closed world to do it in is not the right way to go.

tags: ning, 24hourLaundry, michael+arrington

Comments

[Gina Bianchini]

Stowe,

Thanks for joining the conversation. I just want to address the inaccurancies in Michael's post that you're reiterating here.

Ning is not a closed world. Ning is an online platform for effortlessly creating social web apps for free. Without any coding experience, you can take any of the thousands of active social web applications on Ning today and make them your own in a few easy clicks. You can’t do this anywhere else on the Internet today.

As a developer who does know how to code, there is no easier place to create and run your own web app, social or otherwise, as there are no downloads required, no databases to manage, and no sysadmin headaches. 95% of what you’d have to do to build a web app is already done.

You can run your own ads, map your own domain, and protect your source code if you’d like. These are new services we rolled out in December that you can see if you are a signed in user. We’ll be making them more obvious to the wider public in the coming weeks.

We support external web services from Google Maps (e.g., restaurant reviews with maps, review anything with maps, and Craiglist-style Marketplace with maps), Amazon (e.g., bookshelf and dvd tracker), Yahoo Maps, Flickr, Yahoo, and Gmail. Moreover, because we are an open platform, you can also upload existing PHP modules for other web services, like eBay or Technorati, into any web app on Ning.

As for branding, we are constantly working to improve our service and sometimes err on the side of letting it speak for itself. To this end, we’ve been quietly working on:

1. A major redesign of the entire service to make it friendlier and what we offer more obvious
2. Features to enable non-coders to customize social apps and build new social apps from scratch using components
3. Performance improvements to make Ning even faster and more scalable
4. Support for Ruby and other languages

We haven’t been as obvious with some of this stuff as we should be and perhaps you have to sign in to your account to see a lot of these features, but they are all there. We’ve just posted this morning a summary of our new features at our blog: http://blog.ning.com and we’ll continue to engage in active conversations with our users and anyone else who is interested in what we offer.

Thanks again, Stowe. We appreciate the attention.