Ning, a social app playground
Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications.
I’m still waiting for a beta developer account, so final judgement has to be deferred. Glancing over their developer docs it seems that you’ll need quite some php knowledge to build anything useful, which makes me wonder who’ll end up building stuff on this platform - they offer little more than free hosting and yet another development framework. Web developers probably already have both and it doesn’t look easy enough to get someone without some programming experience going.
Most of the app-ideas on their website are just clones of successful applications like craigslist, del.icio.us and flickr and i’m unconvinced that the web needs more of the same, but i don’t see this getting mass traction anyway (which isn’t necessarily bad). Niche apps seem like a better fit.
The idea of an app-development playground seems really promising for prototyping and experimenting. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.