Ning

Last week I went to yet another Lunch 2.0. This one was at Ning. As I mentioned previously, Ning is of special interest to me. What they are doing is very similar to what we were doing at Ludi Labs. Actually I'd say that if you took a little bit of what Facebook has done with their markup and query languages, and added that to Ning, you get really darn close to what Ludi Labs was doing.

After listening to the folks at Ning and watching their demo, I was really amazed. I went out and created a Ning network for my fellow Ludi Labs survivors. Of course the thing I am most interested in doing is hacking the source code, even though it is in PHP. I've requested it from Ning.

Their content store is also very interesting. I'm curious to see just how extensible it is. They seem to claim they have a large selection of "common" data types. I'm skeptical. Why? Because that was always a thorny issue for us at Ludi Labs. We did the same thing. Actually I'd say that it was one of our mistakes. We created too many data types and each type was too flexible.

Even if they have the too large catalog like we did at Ludi, it's not going to be enough. What if I want to create a social network for Blackberry 8830 users? I create a widget of all the mobile apps that you can install on the 8830. I want people to be able to add to it and to search it. Clearly I'm going to have a data type that Ning does not support. They might have some kind of generic object type that can take user defined attributes, but it's going to have problems when I start busting out searches against these user defined attributes.

This may sound contrived, but trust me it is not. It is something that Ning must solve to be a viable platform. Marc Andreessen did a great write-up about the Facebook platform. One his great points was about how if you write a great Facebook app, you'll be doomed just like iLike. That's because you must host the app on your own server (farm.) He was clearly hinting out how this problem is solved by Ning, where your app is hosted by Ning. But if my little Blackberry app I just described is super slow on Ning once we get a few million entries into it and a few million users running searches against it, then it's no better than the Facebook Catch-22.

Facebook

I must admit, the hype about Facebook's F8 platform has got to me. First, I started playing around with my very under-utilized profile on Facebook. I added some apps: Flickr and Twitter. These are "apps" on my blog as well, so they seemed natural enough. Then I added the most popular new Facebook app, iLike. I figured it would be similar to last.fm, which I had on my blog. I even went to the iLike site, signed up, and insalled their "sidebar" for iTunes.

What a disappointment! First, there is no connection between iLike and the iLike-Facebook-app. To add songs to the iLike-Facebook, you must do it manually. Ick.

Next problem, the iLike sidebar is very buggy. It seemed to keep my CPU utilization pegged. It didn't matter if I was listening to a song or nor, or if "hid" the bar. It's obnoxious anyways, taking up way too much real estate for an application that is a complement to another (iTunes.) When I realized that the songs I listened to on iTunes were not showing up on Facebook, it was obviously time to uninstall iLike.

Ok, so back to Facebook. I like the idea of their platform. It's much of a real platform than any of the widget/gadget/whatever platforms out there. They give you access to Facebook services, and give you UI tools for integrating your app's UI into Facebook.

What's interesting to me is to compare it to Ning. A Facebook app does not live on Facebook. It lives somewhere else. It can communicate with Facebook and its UI is shown inside Facebook. A Ning app lives on Ning. The Ning app must be written in PHP. The Facebook app can be written in any language. An app on Ning gets to take advantage of Ning's scalability. An app on Facebook can see huge traffic, but your server/hosting provider has to able to handle that. You had better find some quality, cheap server hosting.

Obviously I have some special interests in all this. At Ludi Labs, the Roost website had some similarities to Ning. It was a build your own site (we didn't add the social networking adjective) using all of these great services. Of course Ludi failed and Roost was never available to the masses. Thus I find myself rooting for Ning now. I think F8 poses a real problem for them...

Sharefare Update: Ludi Labs & Roost

Six months ago, I posted that I had left Vitria and was working for a start-up called Sharefare. I couldn't say too much about what we were doing at the time, since we were in classic stealth mode. I've gotten some pings from a couple different folks lately about Sharefare, and there's been a lot going on, so I figured it was a good time for an update.


First, Sharefare changed its name to Ludi Labs (I think this still points to the old Sharefare site, be patient.) Ludi Labs comes from Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. The name change was made official about a month ago, and I even have a fancy business card with the new name.

Update, February 2: The CEO of my company has asked me to temporarily remove the information I had provided in this post. I was quite surprised by this request, since I didn't really think there was anything revealing, but c'est la vie.