I’ve never really got Ning but Nat over at O’Reilly Radar comes closest to explaining it to us “Apache configuring MySQL-worshipping junkies with Rails up both forearms” types (i.e. techies):
If you want a photo site, you go to someone’s photo site and hit the “ah gotta git me wunna thayem!” button. Boom, you have a photo site. If you want a new feature, you hit “edit my app” and add it.
and then the kicker:
a Ning photo app is like a “group” on Flickr
So you can take any Ning app, clone it (much better than “Get Your Own” IMO, but then I am an ACMR) and modify it to your group’s needs.
The bit that still makes me shy away from Ning is that you can’t then say “take all the cloned photo apps and aggregate the photo data.” But that is apparently being worked on. That will make Ning work for me.
Couple other good points:
Premium features are things like … putting it in your own domain (instead of foo.ning.com)
and
what if I write a great app and Yahoo! wants to buy me? Their answer: go for it. Your app is your app. You can take [it] off their site.
Though in the later case it isn’t that easy as you then loose Ning’s “storage, tagging, and authentication modules” and have to write your own. I’d like to see Ning support S3 and other storage options through a Ning Storage Abstraction Layer.
Still, Ning is clearer in my mind thanks to that article and with a bit of that cloned-app-aggregation magic I think it could be something amazing.
