As reported by Siliconbeat, among others, Netscape Co-Founder Marc Andreesen has announced the first release of his newest project, Ning. Ning is an open API that promises to drastically lower the technical design hurdles for creating a new social networking platform, enabling users to "take on FaceBook...CraigList...deli.cio.us" by its own description. From SiliconBeat:
Ning, the site tells us, is a free online service (or, as they call it, a "playground") for building so-called "social applications." Social apps, Ning explains, "enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people." We haven't tinkered with it enough, but one interesting feature is that it lets users tag stuff according to subject matter. On the Web sites running on Ning, there is a so-called "Ning Pivot" on the right-hand side that lets you click through sites and other content tagged to a certain subject. It lets you see other users who are tagging to the same subject.
The relative importance of platform design and features, third-party content and user-content (read: profiles) will become an even more important question now. Recent experiences with Xuqa, TheInterestList, and AlwaysOn are even more relevant -- it seems to me that controlling users' interface to social content is at least as important as controlling the data themselves. Expect today's big social software players to guard access to their profiles even more jealously than they have in the past.
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