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Ning

For the highly unlikely case you haven't heard of Ning yet: it's a platform for building and running social web applications (listings, reviews, ratings, recommendations, discussion boards, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wishlists, events, people matching, maps,...).

Ning provides the whole infrastructure and basic building blocks for free. Once you've signed up with Ning (and grabbed the Beta Developer status, which might take a while) you can start creating your very own applications by either cloning and modifying existing ones, or create them from the scratch. (I haven't tried it yet, but a quick peek at the Developer Documentation seems to suggest that it shouldn't be too hard, even for webdummies like me.)

Now my first thought was cool. Lego/Ikea for social software, and my first sentiment was but who needs another 100 del.icio.us, Craigslist, Flickr, LibraryThing, or KittenWar clones? - but of course it's in the hands of the users/developers what they come up with.

On a second thought, I really like a few aspects of Ning:

* the costs for rolling a social app are approaching zero. This is no ticket for usefulness or creativity, in fact it's an invitation for noise and application spam, but it also opens a space for interventions that have not been possible before.

* all content posted to any Ning-based application is covered under a Creative Commons license and thus is reuse-, mix-, and mashable from any other Ning-based application (and everyone else).

* Ning breaks down the barriers between individual applications. You can search for tags, and you will find items within any application in the Ning-space - of course you can restrict your search to individual apps. Hence you just need a single user account for participating in soon to be thousands of apps, but you still have a convenient entry point (http://www.ning.com:80/pivot/any/yourusername) for tracking all your activities.

However, exciting times for the social web.


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