I’ve just read yet another article on Ning (man does their PR firm work hard!) and I’ve noticed a subtle positioning which I have never heard before.

From the ‘After selling Opsware…‘ Wired article:

Andreessen bristles at comparisons with Facebook. “(Ning) is a fully programmable platform, not just a way to inject features from the outside into someone else’s network — like Facebook — but rather your own network completely customized and programmed to work however you want it to work,” he said.

Also, Facebook applications remain wedded to the Facebook platform, whereas with Ning, developers can take what they’ve developed using Ning’s resources and move it to their own servers without any involvement from Ning at all. That openness and flexibility may prove an attractive alternative, once the bloom fades from Facebook’s rose.

I’d love to know more about what ‘moves to other servers’.  I was under the impression that Ning is built on a huge Solaris backend running Opsware infrastructuire (I presume) and are an amalgam of Java and php.  So what moves to other servers?  Is this the php piece of the puzzle?

But the idea of taking an individual feature and combining it with other functionality - is what’s coolio about all this.  That’s what we do - in spades.

Of course Ning will be getting compared allot to Facebook nowadays - and rightly so because we’re all figuring out different ways of providing open social networking platforms - and Facebook ain’t the only one.

Its kind of a shame that Friendster, Tribe and MySpace - so DIDN’T grok all this - but Yahoo is catching up, Microsoft may well figure it out - and its clear - Orkut ain’t the only ’social network’ platform Google has.

All software of the future will be about people - and everybody wants to be the infrastructure provider.  Whether its via the ID and profile itself, or presence or blogging or media sharing - the battle lines are forming.

So isolating individual, componentized features as a ‘web service’ is a key part of any open social network strategy.  And is exactly what KickApps does - and PeopleAggregator as well.

We have an upcoming client (can’t tell you their name til end of Sept.) which has a ASP .Net plaftrom and wishes to ‘bring social features’ to their existing web based solution.

So we’ve widigetized PeopleAggregator - and we’re handing them individual components (such as ‘Leave Comments‘ or ‘Reviews‘ or ‘Rate‘ something) which then get plopped into the client’s ASP .Net pages.  Our HTML is rendered through their CSS and the end-user never knows that these ’social features’ - are in fact coming from a PeopleAggregator driven platform.

All we have to do is match up our membership databases - via federated ID SSO (single sign-on) using OpenID - and then connect to their ‘content database’ via unique APIs developed for this context and solution.

Now it seems that Ning is starting to talk about solutions like this.  That’s very coolio.

With all the attention on Facebook and the call for ‘an ecto for social networks’ its fun to see how each company groks the space and the opportunity ahead.

But what you won;t see from Ning is their source code in download form.

While we are all wrapped up and ready to be downloaded - in fact we run on GoDaddy.

That’s the difference between us and Ning.  You can download a copy of PeopleAggregator and setup and run your own Ning.   Or use it to create your own kind of meta-network, hosted, aggregator kind of community thingie.  A DLA construction kit.

Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll take some of their $44M and rewrite their platform, backwards supporting their own APIs along the way.  They could then reverse engineer their own code - to simplfy it and get it ready for download.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 4:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.