Another day, another dollar

Yoz asked below what I thought of Ning.com, having had a play with it.

First impressions - for some reason I'm thinking Sharepoint 2003. I think it's the idea of user empowerment which a lot of web 2.0 stuff is trying to do - personal home pages, all that kind of stuff. It's also incredibly simple to set up nice, personal, and indeed granular web apps. Who hasn't seen something like Hot or Not and thought "wow - but what if it was only for people dressed as robots? We could call it bot or not"? Well, maybe that's just me. But the idea's there. Flickr's brilliant, Flagr's fab, etc etc, but it's nice to limit these things to certain groups of people. Teams, clubs, even families - especially with social groups becoming less and less constrained by geography.

I also think - and this is how it's going to be most useful to me - the ability to twiddle with the code is a fantastic idea. It's a learning environment.

Criticisms? All the apps look the same and do pretty much the same - at the moment. It's early days and I can see it's not going to be long before people start to learn more and really open up on the site.

Suggestions? A bulletin board a little more powerful than the current forums thing - along the lines of phpBB or similar. Groups who'd be using these apps will want to talk. Lots.

Actually, the ability to embed an app - especially a google mashup in the first post of a BB, or as a permanent part of the page (think two frames - top one is mashup, bottom one is bulletin board) would be really good. So you can discuss an app (or the data on it) without having to flick between pages/tabs/browsers all the time.

Now that would be something AJAX could do really, really well.