Ning Playground Launches

Ning has just launched their namesake service. Though it meets all the superficial standards for Web 2.0 buzzword compliance, including tag clouds, a beta badge, and name-checks of Flickr and del.icio.us, it looks like there's some real substance to this new application-building platform as well.

Formerly known by some as 24 Hour Laundry, Ning is hard to sum up succinctly. But the core idea is that it's a service for building social software online. The best description on the site is in the Developer Documentation, which offers perhaps an overview of what's possible:

Developing your social apps on the Ning Playground has some advantages:

• App creation tools - including the ability to view the source code of and clone any running app on the Ning Playground
• App management, hosting, and security
• Example Apps you can clone and run in minutes
• User registration, user profile and role management
• Tagging as a built-in service for every app
• Navigation and search

Applications built with the service can be cloned by anyone and modified at will to include new features or functionality. And it's easy to discover the applications that are popular with other users on the service. The list of open standards that power the service are formidable, and it seems like neither content nor application code is locked down, though of course the code would be of little use without the Ning service.

We'll be keeping our eyes open for interesting uses of the service that intersect with the information that people are publishing using Six Apart blogging tools. One particular item of interest is that all of the "pivot pages" (the tag cloud pages that let you browse items on the service) support dynamically generating web feeds of their content. Of course, we think the feed you'll most want to subscribe to is the one for the Ning Blog, which is powered by Movable Type 3.2.