Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Monday, January 23, 2006

Ninged

So if you follow Bubblegen, you'll know that when Ning came out, we didn't buy the hype, and instead pointed out that their model had numerous problems, not least of which was that it was too geeky - it was a great example, in fact, of one of the key barriers to growth for 2.0.

It took a couple of months, but finally there was a long conversation this wknd about exactly the fact that Ning is cool for geeks, but less cool for everyone else, kicked off by TechCrunch.

I guess the point is that we predicted this some time ago, so it's not exactly a surprise - it pays to think a little more strategically about all this cool stuff.

-- umair // 8:57 PM // 1 comments

Comments:

Hmm. Didn't know about Workday, maybe that's closer to how I imagine Ning going. But I'll still put some kind of outside bet on Ning.

If only they can see what they really are : a social development platform. Yep, it's for geeks. They need to get over that and sell to geeks.

Why's there no Ning video equivalent to the infamous Rails "blog-in-15-mins" or TurboGears "wiki-in-20" videos?

Why not cool libraries (Ajax, access Amazon's search API) being added regularly and hyped to programmers? What about compilation of your application to a server of your choice?

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phil jones // 3:57 PM