24 Hour Laundry is Ning
Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for people to build and run social applications. Social “apps” are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.
Our goal with Ning is to see what happens when you open things up and make it easy to create, share, and discover new social apps. These might include for any city, your own take on Craigslist…for any passion, your own take on Match.com…for any interest, your own take on Zagat…for any event, your own take on Flickr…for any school, your own take on the Facebook…for any topic, your own take on del.icio.us…for any mammal, your own take on Hot or Not or Kitten War.
Looks like it might provide a convenient way to put together small customized applications without writing backend code. I’ve requested a developer account to see if it’s easier / better than rolling your own. I noticed that their site seems to have gone up and down a few times today, once while I was in the middle of signing up. The site looks pretty slick, but it will have to stay up most of the time to draw users and application development. It does sound like they provide a lot of common housekeeping and glue:
Ning also offers you a set of services such as user registration, account management, search, view source, adding and displaying tags, information on the app itself, tell a friend, report this, messaging, and security. You can access these services on the Ning Sidebar which you can see if you scroll up and look at the right 225 pixels of any app page like this one.
I’m sure there will be a lot of “Hello, World”-equivalent applications on Ning real soon now.
More from Om Malik, TechCrunch
See also: Pros and Cons of Stealth Mode Startups
Tags: ning, software
