Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has created Ning, a “playground for social applications”.
Call it Web 2.0, call it this year’s dotcom hype, call it what you want. The latest and coolest generation of websites are designed to be bent, broken and pasted together by users themselves. Well, users who can code, anyway. Photo-sharing site Flickr, Google Maps, and blog search engine Technorati are just a few sites which publish interfaces to their internal workings, so anyone with some programming skills can use their data to their own purposes — see for example our earlier story about online maps.
Ning takes things a step further — rather than providing a specific hackable service, Ning’s API provides general tools for building community and data-based online applications. Imagine the bastard child of Google Maps and Hotornot.com, but done by everyday users instead of people who really understand how to program. We’re a little doubtful — our resident geek observes that while it’s easy to Ning-up a work-alike of an existing site, real innovation takes some real coding skills.
More about this ‘mash up playground’ on the Googlemapsmania blog.
![[Image relating to the story Addictive TV at the National Theatre]](http://www.bigshinything.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/2789781914_ace34af304.jpg)
![[Image relating to the story Milking It]](http://www.bigshinything.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/33902.jpg)
![[Image relating to the story Fashionomics]](http://www.bigshinything.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/2765266796_b639055356.jpg)
![[Image relating to the story All About the East End]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2407/2721677989_5f1c2d3564.jpg)
Add a Comment