Marc Andreesen joins EBay.

Hmmm. Is it just coincidence that Donahoe is talking about powerful communities when Andreessen’s current baby–Ning–is a social networking platform. Can you say exit strategy?

Admittedly, that eBay buying Ning idea is a leap, but crazier things–like eBay’s acquisition of Skype–have happened.

I must admit that I've warmed to the new Ning. It turns out to be pretty useful for putting a quick YASNS together. Buying it (and Andreesen) would definitely be a good move for EBay (if they can avoid wasting the opportunities the way they have Skype and Paypal)

Trouble with third-party widgets at Ning.

Now everyone is at the Yasn-as-platform game.

MySpace

Facebook

Google (Friend Connect comming soon)

Microsoft have to buy / partner with MySpace or Facebook now or lose their place in the Yasn-as-platform game.

A smart, medium sized company who'd also like to get into this would be looking at Ning.

Google App Engine to challenge Amazon, Ning etc.

Write your applications in Python ... w00t!

Update : OK, this is big, at least this is going "mainstream". Poor Ning, they had all the great ideas, Amazon too ... but it sounds like Google are taking the whole package : integrated development environment, database, python, logging, version control, multiple developers working on same code-base etc. etc. and bringing it to the masses.

But only a limited number of free accounts ...

Update 2: early chatter is complaining about Python-only, actually I'm not sure it's gonna be Python that people struggle to get their heads around ... I think it's gonna be BigTable.

Ning faces the same issues as Tribe

Mark Andreesen weighs in with his explanation of OpenSocial.

Basically sounds like you can register a callback with the YASNS which pulls HTML / javascript from your server. Sounds very good and simple as a way of embedding your application into their pages. Great! But not much of a clue what it means for whether your application can get access to the social network itself. Or to what extent.

What he does say is that apps. can (are likely to) test which YASN they're in and run differently in each. So, er, yeah ... OpenSocial doesn't prevent apps. taking advantage of YASN-specific stuff.

So it's kind of what I expected ... but let's see ...

(Drumming his fingers impatiently ...)

Google leading a consortium of YASNS for a common application API is, of course, a fantastic idea.

I can run my app. on Ning, Orkut (which, if you live in this part of the world is a big deal), SalesForce (!!!) and LinkedIn? I am there, baby! (Or at least, just as soon as my FB application is done, I'll be porting it there. ;-)

Will it work to overthrow Facebook? Who knows?

One question is, what resources of access to the users the API will offer developers? This is where the cultural component of the YASNS becomes tricky.

The "killer" part of the YASN-as-platform is what it lets you do with people. And that varies with the culture and privacy policies of the YASN.

The crucial test here will be not "do these networks all provide the same API call to place a chunk of HTML on the user's home-page?". That's pretty boring and not what YASNS-as-platforms are about. (Aside : in fact, a good high-level language ought to be able to abstract away from those differences. ;-)

No, the crucial test is "will their query language (equivalent to Facebook's FQL) allow the same kind of searches to be done on the social network?"

The paradox is, that if the answer to that question is "yes" then all these social networks have just turned themselves into commodity web-hosting. In fact, it's worse than that. They'll neither be able to compete with each other on applications - everyone will have the same - nor on what I call "link-management" (ie. relationship-management) - because that's exactly what a common query language will standardize. So the only thing they have left to differentiate themselves is ownership of your social-network data.

Listen up : if the "common API" includes a common query language and set of relation-types and query permissions, then this is a big incentive for the YASNS to more jealously try to defend their "ownership" of your social network and will disincentivate them from sharing it or allowing "cross-network queries".

However, I don't expect that that's what's going to happen. YASNS-as-platforms have got to realize that they are offering a platform for relationship-management and they'll try to compete by offering different link-management features. So on LinkedIn you'll be able to filter and segment and query your social-network by different criteria from those available on Orkut. And the kind of things you can do with relationships will be the reason you choose LinkedIn rather than Orkut (or vice-versa).

And, if I'm right, and YASNS do see that their strategy is competing on link-management services, then any common query language defined within the consortium is necessarily a lowest-common denominator. And developers will be focused on taking advantage of the more comprehensive and sophisticated relationship management facilities which are only available on a particular YASN. So in practice the number of really interesting widgets and applications which can run across the different YASNS is going to be trivial.

ps : shame I didn't see Tribe on the list of consortium members. That could at least keep them in the game if these applications run on it.

Marc Andreesen has a great blog-post that starts with an attempt at defining what a platform is.

He breaks it down into 3 levels :

Level 1 platforms provide an API for external applications to call their services.

Level 2 platforms (eg. Facebook) help the external application present themselves by incorporating the applications within their UI. I'd say that we're really talking about platforms which provide a "callback" to the application.

Level 3 platforms host and execute the application themselves. With the benefit that the platform can broker richer integration between the applications. This is obviously what Salesforce's Force does. And, of course, Ning - the best part of this email is that it signal that Andreeson is trying to promote the "development environment" idea of Ning which was the exciting idea that kind of got lost when they rebranded it as "just another social network". (Asde : In fact, does Ning have what it takes to become a budget Force / AppExchange rival?)

He goes on to make a very good point :

Second, beware overfocusing on the apps of the past when thinking about the platforms of the future.

Lots of people got confused by the idea of apps running in the browser because when they thought of apps, they thought of the apps they used already on their PCs -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint -- and not the apps that would get built on the web -- eBay, Amazon, Salesforce.com. Now, it turns out in the fullness of time that word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are also moving into the web -- as Google is demonstrating. But way before that happened, the web led people to create lots of new kinds of applications that were not possible on the PC.

A new platform typically enables a new set of applications that were not previously possible. Why else would there be a need for a new platform?

Hmmm ... I wonder why people are setting up groups on Ning when they didn't on Tribe?

The functionality looks to me to be pretty similar.

Marc Andreessen (remember that Ning is now a social networking service building platform?) looks at Facebook's platform.

Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.

...

what Facebook is now doing is a lot more sophisticated than simply MySpace-style embedding: Facebook is providing a full suite of APIs -- including a network protocol, a database query language, and a text markup language -- that allow third party applications to integrate tightly with the Facebook user experience and database of user and activity information.

And then, on top of that, Facebook is providing a highly viral distribution engine for applications that plug into its platform. As a user, you get notified when your friends start using an application; you can then start using that same application with one click. At which point, all of your friends become aware that you have started using that application, and the cycle continues. The result is that a successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation.

Finally, Facebook is promising economic freedom -- third-party applications can run ads and sell goods and services to their hearts' content.

Meanwhile, some people seem to be doing well on it.

Umair on Ning : Communities aren't networks

I wonder what he means ...

Hmmm. Social Networking news ...

Cisco buying Tribe's tech. People are confused.

Meanwhile Ning seems to have decided to reinvent itself as ... erm ... Tribe : a generic build-your-own-social-network site.

Me, I'm confused too. And more than that, I'm disappointed by the Ning change. Taking a quick look at the site, it seems to have utterly disowned the previous "social development environment" incarnation of Ning, handing over that mantle to Yahoo Pipes.

OK, I half understand : maybe the business model wasn't working. Not everyone is, or wants to be, a programmer, and Ning didn't get the kind of traction of a MySpace or YouTube. Nor was it likely to.

Faced with that predicament, my suggestion to Ning might have been to pitch it as a white-label development tool for third-party resellers : small agencies who are creating web-sites or intranets for other companies. Or maybe something to do work on enterprise intranets. However they clearly wanted something else.

Now what we've got looks suspiciously like Tribe given a makeover by 37 Signals.

Which is mysterious. I'm a member of Tribe, and I like it very much. But it's widely considered to be a "failure" in the YASN market. What makes Ning think that the business model is viable? Or that they can make it work?

One thing that occurs to me, maybe this is really the old Ning in disguise. Perhaps a lot of social development stuff is there behind the scenes, and this is simply wrapping it in something that looks more familiar to the general public. That would make some sense, use "make your own tribe" to draw in people who wouldn't have dared go near the old Ning, but then just happen to have a bunch of Ning-apps. sitting around which can be add to these networks. And which the more curious users could learn to customize and share.

However, having gone to play around a bit, that doesn't seem to be the case with the new Ning. Contrariwise, it looks like history has been ruthlessly rewritten; Ning was allegedly founded in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create social networks. The old Ning was full of "HotOrNot" style comparison games and mashups with Google Maps. But while the new Ning allows you to add discussion forums, photos and videos to your tribe social network, hotornots and mashups are conspicuously absent.

Maybe the developers' docs will cast more light on things. You can still program stuff, but there's no hint of users sharing their code with each other, which was the really interesting part of the old system.

So why does Cisco want Tribe's code? Beats me. Speculating wildly, maybe there's something to do with convergence in the home between television, internet, entertainment etc. And maybe the next step beyond BitTorrent peer-sharing and You Tube is some kind of private P2P video sharing within social networks, so that tribes become an organizing principle for video, rivaling television channels.

But that's speculating wildly ...

Anyway. I'm a member of several YASNs but only two mean anything to me : Tribe and Linked-In. I joined Linked-In years ago, and pretty much forgot about it. It's a pretty inert sort of service. I wouldn't think about it or visit the site at all except that people I know keep joining it and linking to me. I've started to come to the conclusion that there's something rather interesting about this extremely slow social network. Most importantly, it's all about the world outside the web and outside web-time. You don't go there, don't do anything with it. But slowly and surely the network keeps accreting more ex-colleagues at the glacial pace of 4 or 5 a year.

That's all it does. But it's more succesful at that than anything else. I tried to recruit my IRL friends to Tribe. But only a couple of the more web-oriented ones bothered to join. Yet people who have no time or inclination to be on the web keep turning up on Linked-In. Whereas Tribe is great for meeting new people and having valuable conversations, Linked-In turns out to be great for reconnecting and tracking "old" people. I guess it's the combination of seriousness and undemandingness; people join it who have no time for web-culture and who are scared to become involved in the more active YASNs.

Anil Dash on Yahoo Pipes

Points out what a good IDE it is (and analogy with Ning)

The other platform I'm going to be watching is, of course, Yahoo Pipes.

By weird synchronicity, yesterday I wrote an email to someone where I was talking about ideas that intrigued me, and I was thinking of examples where you'd want a fluent dynamic gestural device like, say, a pen-mouse or a Wii controller for real-time programming.

And, looking for an example, I went into a crazy rant, inspired by Seb Paquet's Algebra of Feeds.

Here's what I wrote :

Or maybe you can create software "in real-time" by, for example, routing and mixing RSS feeds. Eg. you'd have feed-traffic-controllers, pulling together, mashing up and mixing the outputs of different web-services, maybe by dragging and dropping, or sketching pipelines with a pen or Wii-like controller. 10 years ago, Philip Greenspun needed his own server and to be a serious programmer to make the Bill Gates Wealth Clock. 4-5 years ago, smart people were mashing up Google maps with other services with little bits of glue script. Now we have reblogging services that help automate the process of getting a feed from one place and pushing it elsewhere. And Ning which is a sort of platform for creating mash-ups and reusing other people's code.

Jump forward 5 more years. You can imagine feeds of "objects" (data + encapsulated behaviour) being published. And enterprising people noticing that objects from feed 1 have input signatures of this format, and objects of feed 2 have output signatures of that format and it only needs them to be wired together in the right way, for us to have this useful combination. So how to define the wiring? Why not just draw something like a patch diagram in a virtual modular synth? A diagram of Unix-like pipes. How frequently does this need to be done? As data gets more dynamic, you might want to have people updating the wiring diagrams daily. Why make it hard work? Why not just let them draw it with a pen, or Wii controller.

And now, to quote, Tim OReilly :

Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

These are very interesting times.

Hendy commented that Ning isn't open source.

Agreed. I'd like to see an Open Source online web-app development / code-generation / code-management / code-sharing platform. Possibly Trac could evolve in this direction (from a very different starting point.)

I notice that I missed something from the list of improvents (in that previous post I linked) in web development. I said templating-oriented development (eg. PHP), and object publishing systems (eg. Zope) were the only real changes from trying to program web-apps as though they were any other kind of app.

Perhaps I need to add continuations based servers like Seaside. I finally watched these videos and got how cool this is.

Essentially you're allowing the language to hide all the session / interaction management.