Techcrunch has the scoop that 24 Hour Laundry has launched and is now called Ning.
Seems like a cool app. Basically an IDE for normal people to build their own social applications. Might really take off and I wish them well.
My initial thought was that they’re going to have significant scalability problems.
Friendster had them but imagine you’re running a company that’s hosting five Friendster-style sites.
Unless they really have their cluster designed to scale linearly for a long time to go you can expect that they’ll have problems shortly.
Of course if they hire the best and the brightest they might have a shot. I certainly wish them the best of luck.
Update:
I applied for a Ning beta developer account. I’m going to try to see if they handle some odd situations to see of flexible they are. For example I noticed that their Restaurant Review App doesn’t have an RSS feed so I’m wondering how hard this would be to add.
It’s also obvious that you couldn’t write an aggregator with this thing. You couldn’t build a Technorati or a Rojo.
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October 4, 2005 at 1:42 am
You can watch an RSS feed of any app via the pivot:
http://www.ning.com:80/pivot/restaurantreviewswithmaps/any/any/any?format=rss
Or of any content type. Or of any user. Or of anything, really.
October 4, 2005 at 5:38 am
It would be pretty sad (and unexpected) if the Andreesen, being the chairman of Opsware, didn’t steer the company away from scale/provisioning problems early on.
October 4, 2005 at 6:40 am
Hope we can avoid falling over on scalability =) The folks involved are pretty good though, and it isn’t an afterthought ;-)
October 4, 2005 at 10:31 am
It would be pretty sad and I hope I’m wrong.
The problem is that all the existing Open Source tools don’t scale. The corporate ones don’t either of course…
We’ll see… time will tell.
October 4, 2005 at 10:33 am
Brian…
Awesome. Glad to hear it’s not an afterthought!!! Go Ning go! :)
October 5, 2005 at 6:43 am
FYI
Someone has named their app Tailrank on Ning.
http://tailrank.ning.com/list.php?sort=winner
October 6, 2005 at 12:42 am
Also, I just built an aggregator — took me about 2 hours. (So far it’s RSS 2.0 only.) Note that this is designed to work like a planet, not like a rojo, but I’m not sure I understand why you think those kind of apps couldn’t be built.
October 6, 2005 at 12:55 am
Chris.. it’s just a hunch. I think I’m still waiting for my ning developer account to be approve. I’ll play with your planet.ning.com tonight.
Thanks!