Technical Ramblings

I noticed someone had said Marc Canter wrote about Ning. I think that he may have missed an important part of what Ning is about, though.

Why?

Well, let’s start from the top:

I’m pleading with Gina Bianchini to have Ning PLEASE support the PeopleAggregator APIs once it’s out – and I don’t see any reason why she won’t.

No longer does the “Someone else needs to do it” mentality need apply: Applications on Ning are open source. Code can be mixed, cloned, and run any way you want to — including a way to load files and modules from other applications! So, if you have an API you want to support, support it: just develop it and let people know to use XN_Application::includeFile(), document it for ning users, and you can develop your API for whatever you want and have other users use it.

So, once the API for the website you’re talking about is complete — write some code, and put it on Ning, then get people to use it. That’s what Ning is about: Sharing, putting things together, and bringing “View Source” back to the people. This is your chance to make good on something web browsers learned that Macromedia never has: the ability to look at the way something works inside is a huge boon to development, as I think we’ll see as time goes on.

Of course, there’s also the question of whether Canter still believes that Andreesen: sure as hell hasn’t done shit since – what 1995? 😉

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Ning, Social, Web Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.