Build your own social apps?
Update: I just wanted to clarify that this site does a lot of Reblogging, so if you are wondering where my content is coming from…well, it’s coming from my RSS feeds. Here’s a link to my OPML file. You can figure this out by looking just above the content of the entry where it says (via somesite.com), so you get the point that I’m not the content creator. I don’t want to take credit for something that’s not mine.
There was a lot of buzz (some good, some bad) earlier this year about Mark Andreessen’s latest effort, code named 24 Hour Laundry. The company has finally come out of the dark and is launching Ning, which is basically an easy to use platform for quickly building social applications. This raises one big question: the core value of most social application is in whether or not it can build a real community. eBay, Craigslist, Flickr, del.icio.us and others really succeeded because of the communities they built, rather than just the technology. Thus, the idea of having lots of people easily creating new social applications might not seem too appealing. Those apps are pretty much worthless without the community, right? It might be a useful way to rapidly prototype a new app, but can it turn into something more? Actually… it might. If you start to think about it more as social situated software, suddenly the idea becomes a lot more interesting. The idea of situated software is that it serves a specific need for a specific (often very small) group of people. It doesn’t need to scale. It just needs to serve that group. It’s certainly likely that a system like Ning could provide a platform for that (though, there’s no guarantee that it will really work out that way). What it really comes down to is empowering users to create something they couldn’t create before. Like blogging, podcasting and other new “creation” tools, you can bet that some people will complain that most of what comes out of Ning will be awful and useless (do people really need to create their own take on Craigslist?). That’s not really the point. Of course, plenty of it will be awful and useless — but, by making it easy, a few things might be quite useful to certain people, and that’s what will matter. Still, we’ve seen other companies announce similar plans without getting all that far. Charles Simonyi’s Intentional Software and JotSpot both positioned themselves as providing just such a platform — but neither has gone all that far. Ning’s focus is definitely much more on getting developers involved, but it still will depend on whether or not those developers do anything.
One things to note is that these days almost any application is a social application. Modern users want their apps to be aware of their social network, to have ‘tags’, etc.. Blank White Servers allow the concept of your social network (and tags, and login credentials, and photo album, and so on) to be shared across all of the available applications. These applications will tap into the creativity of the crowds, practically guaranteeing that the features and functionality that are needed most will be made to exist. Blank White Servers like Ning are also a precursor to a ‘metaverse’ (they’re a bit like descendants of MUDs when you think about it; I’m also keeping my eye on Croquet.)
Comment by Dav — October 4, 2005 @ 12:51 pm
What I’m really excited about, and to state the obvious, is what folks are going to do, which has already been done, but better. A better Friendster or Del.icio.us, taking these apps to the next level. What is even more exciting is doing what hasn’t or couldn’t be done until now, this will open a whole new realm of possibilities, mashups of apps, mixing, matching, all kinds of stuff. This is fantastic.
Comment by Scott — October 4, 2005 @ 2:10 pm
Absolutely, exactly what I’m talking about! Established sites with trivial but popular applications (like the ones you mentioned) will never be able to keep up.
Comment by Dav — October 5, 2005 @ 12:05 pm
Personally I think Technorati is crap, I hope someone can build an app similar but that blows them out of the water, their product blows, their support blows and they just don’t deliver.
Comment by Scott — October 5, 2005 @ 12:15 pm
Thanks for clarifying the credit issue, I fixed that on my site where’d I’d pointed to this post. I totally missed the “via” line and even now it’s a little hard to tell where the quoting starts and stops. What about setting those blockquotes off with a different background color or something?
Comment by Andrew — October 5, 2005 @ 1:05 pm
[...] Thursday October 06th 2005, 7:09 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized
Following through a link from Andrew Otwell’s post on Ning, to see [...]
Pingback by Blackbeltjones/Work: » MUDning — October 6, 2005 @ 12:11 pm
please work ning pepole
Comment by varian johnson — September 23, 2008 @ 1:56 pm
what happend to myspace for kids
Comment by varian johnson — September 23, 2008 @ 1:57 pm