Gina Bianchini 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.