5 February 06 from glenn mcdonald 2
Well, I just tried, and it went about as badly as it could possibly go. The reason they want you to clone an existing app is that that's really the only action they've succeded in making easy. Otherwise it's just a new PHP development environment, and either there aren't any new primitives of what I would consider "social" functions (identity management, privacy control, facilitation of sharing, data flow from and to other systems...), or else there are but their documentation is such an unmitigated disaster that I can't even discern the implication of their existence. There don't even seem to be very many interesting application building tools, never mind social elements.
Not being a PHP programmer already, myself, I see no incentive to do anything here. Actually, I can't see the incentive for a PHP programmer, either, except that Ning provides free hosting with PHP available, which is certainly worth something. If you want a lecture on the importance of escaping display HTML, though, and an "environment" in which you yourself have to care, you can get it plenty of other places.
Am I missing something huge? Has anybody done anything real with this? I've read implications elsewhere that there the major non-programmer features are still to come, so I'll suspend real judgment, but I have to worry that releasing this iteration harmed their cause more than it helped it.
3 February 06 from glenn mcdonald 2
No. And I haven't played with Ning since shortly after its debut, so it'd be interesting to try. It's clearly not the big thing I'm after, but that doesn't mean it isn't cool.
(And today was my last day at EMC, so I have the spare time!)
Have you done much with it?