Ning (1.0) Was Too Early
Sridhar April 8, 2008 09: 12 am
That was the first thought that crossed my mind as I looked at Google AppEngine. Yeah, there are differences - Ning 1.0 was PHP, AppEngine is Python. You hosted your apps in myapp.ning.com vs myapp.appspot.com. But here is the most important difference of all: Ning was too early, and it was, well, Ning, as opposed to Google. Ning smartly realized that early too, so Ning 2.0 moved to a new sexy model of “Build Your Own Social Network”, but I believe the heart of their Ning 1.0 system is still in there, carefully tucked away so as not to scare the average social networker with query languages and such.
Here is my reaction to AppEngine: I asked our engineers to brush up on their Python. Fortunately, we have experience in it - a lot of our test automation scripts are Python based. I think AppEngine is going to be monstrously successful. And we at Zoho are going to embrace it whereever we can, just as we are already playing with Amazon AWS.
Fundamentally, we are a software company. We don’t compete against Google because of our infrastructure advantage over them, that’s for sure. Initiatives like Amazon AWS and Google AppEngine let us be a software company again - and that is a good thing! So here we come, Python … and to Ning, here is someone who remembered your original innovation. Thank you!
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This is a good stance! Much better then 37Signals and the Huddlechat ‘controversy’.
I thought the same thing re: Ning.
The hosted application functionality of “Ning 1.0″ still exists, and I use it every day for one thing or another. A very handy way to throw together a PHP-based app quickly.
A few of mine:
http://linkit.ning.com
http://rpsongs.ning.com
http://twitterphone.ning.com/
Those last two were thrown together in a few hours each and have been on auto-pilot ever since. I look at them every couple of months, and they’re always plugging along.
AppEngine - Web Hypercard, finally…
Google’s AppEngine is being compared to Amazon’s EC2/S3, Google deserves credit here for coming up with a pretty differently-positioned product. There may be overlap for many users of course, but it’s really operating at a whole different level of t…
Well, that and Ning never provided documentation. There was an API, and that was it. No useful guides (a few token intro pages to the Content Store, etc.) and some contributed articles about how to make static pages and create a new class. But there were never any meaningful tutorials or examples, and this is why only expert PHP developers can hack at Ning.
The Content Store is the major problem. It’s explained in hazy terms, its source isn’t available, and it’s very tough to work with for a beginner to intermediate coder, as would be any other major undocumented software feature.
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Well put.
I prefer Zoho’s software to Google’s, but I’ve been drawn towards the reliability of Googe’s infrastructure. If you can borrow that infrastructure, then I can choose based on the merits of the software again.
Wow, really? I only discovered Ning after they’d already gone social network.
I was looking at the site thinking, “It could make such a great general application platform! Why this social networking nonsense?” They wanted the developer to make his backend datastore accessible to all in the grand spirit of sharing, and I just wasn’t sure how that was going to work for hosting anything even halfway serious. So I ultimately moved on.