Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Andreessen launches developer 'playground'

October 04, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Andreessen launches developer 'playground'

TAGS: Application Development

Stealth start-up Ning unveiled itself on Monday, offering a free online service for creating and using social applications.

Co-founders Gina Bianchini and former Netscape exec Marc Andreessen refer to Ning as a Playground, by which they mean a "sphere of unrestricted pleasurable activity" or a place to build fun, interactive applications.

Many bloggers have been waiting for the project, code-named 24 Hour Laundry, to emerge from stealth mode.

According to the Ning site, social apps are web applications that let people match, transact, and communicate with other people. Social apps can include listings, reviews, ratings, recommendations, discussion boards, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wishlists, events, people matching, and maps.

The Ning Playground lets developers create applications by viewing the source code of similar applications, or by cloning another application and modifying, according to Ning officials.

Examples shown on Ning include personalized takes on sites such as Craigslist, Flickr, del.icio.us, Match.com, or Zagat.

The site offers application creation tools, including the ability to view the source code or clone any of the applications on the Ning Playground. Other services on the site are application management, hosting, and security; example applications that can be cloned easily, user registration, user profile, and role management, tag creation, and search.

The social apps Ning is talking about can stand alone or use web services to pull in information from sites such as Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, or others that offer API services for developers.

Although there's plenty of information on the site in the form of FAQs, exactly what the free service offers aside from a "wow" factor - as well as how Ning plans to make money - are a little fuzzy. Ning's site says the company hopes to make enough money from advertising and premium services to support free services for the foreseeable future.

In addition to CEO Bianchini and Andreessen, Ning has about 14 full-time employees.

Posted by Cathleen Moore on October 4, 2005 03:47 PM

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