On Ning

The Long Tail Blog has one of the better summaries of what Ning is and why (I believe) it is niche but significant. Too many people snicker that this is Marc Andreesen creating a service for a tiny niche market, and therefore toss it off as irrelevant. Yes, niche, but a very good and innovative – and highly social, empowering – niche solution can be incredibly powerful.

“Examples include a sermon exchange, a babysitting co-op or a college semester abroad community site. You might do it because you needed it yourself, and–who knows–it might snowball into something more. That’s the great thing about community and user-contributed content. Simply providing a catalyst can often be enough.”

It empowers the end-user – who doesn’t have to be a developer – to create software that works for them. I fervently believe this is the trend of the future. Creating Web frameworks like Ning that remove much of the complexity of creating complex applications, and put control in the hands of the end-user. The develooper’s job becomes creation and maintenance of that framework, not building the end app anymore.