kevinbriody.net

Dare has a good post about “What’s so great about Ning”:

I personally think Ning is ahead of its time. What we need today is more web sites turning themselves into web platforms as well as business models for both the web platforms AND the developers building on these web platforms. As an industry we’re still muddling our way through at this point. Once we’ve have an ecosystem of web platforms as well as sustainable business models for the various offerings, the next step is how to broaden the target of these platforms outside the traditional developer market. This is similar to the same way that Microsoft brought programming against COM components to the masses back in the 1990s with Visual Basic except this time the platform is the entire Web and not just one vendor’s operating system.

As does Alex Barnett (who is nice enough to quote my own poorly worded take on the matter):

4. In the same way blogging made it easy for non-technical users to publish text to the web, services like Ning go the next step. They allow non technical users to recombine and augment content, to create their own new content (as per definition of content above). This means a mum at home can potentially become a web services integrator (I use the web services loosely here, but you get the point). This is what the excitement is about – it opens new doors and opportunities for non-technical folks to create brand new stuff (most of completely for non-commercial reasons). Anything that brings us closer to TBL’s vision will always get attention.

I mostly agree with Dare’s point that Ning is probably a bit early for the market. However Ning 2.0 – or whatever company extends and matures the idea – will be huge. As Alex says, just like blogging brought Web publishing within reach of the average non-technical consumer, and Flickr did the same for non-geek photogs, Ning takes it all a step further by bringing the fabled “Web 2.0” – the programmable Web – within reach of people who would be terrified of the idea of “programming”.

The future for Web developers is in two groups:

1. The platform developers – those who build the Flickrs, Nings, blog engines, etc. of the future, the tools that enable John Doe consumer to tell the Web what to do, to use the Web to express ideas and creativity without knowing code.

2. The mashup artists – the one’s who take all those specialized components and combine them in unique new ways that John Doe might not have thought of – or that still require some real code knowledge to smooth out the edges. Thanks to the hard work of the platform guys, in most cases mashup artists won’t really need to understand the guts of computer science, databases, etc. They’ll get to focus on the end-user experience using bits and pieces from all over the web.

Yes, Ning is rough. It’s early. It is by no means the Holy Grail. However it is a great glimpse at what the future might hold.