We just passed 220,000 social networks on the Ning Platform. Wahoo!

We also moved the Ning Blog to Word Press. In addition to enabling a handy little plug-in for fully integrating the Ning ID registration system with Word Press authentication (as Ernie mentioned here), Word Press is just fun to use. I’m a huge fan.

Unsurprisingly, I’m also a huge fan of the 220,000 social networks on Ning. Our Advocacy team has done a great job highlighting a few of the amazing networks Network Creators have whipped up on the platform recently. What’s exciting is that they are a fraction of the full picture.

They don’t capture all the big and small ways folks are using private social networks for families, weddings, teams, friends organizing a trip, youth groups, and every other conceivable way a posse may want to organize.

When we first started Ning, I thought we’d need to be at millions of social networks before the full potential of all of this was truly felt. I was wrong.

Looking around at the sheer range and diversity of the networks on Ning today, it’s clear to me that when we get to millions of social networks it will simply blow my mind.

I can’t wait.

Marc has a great post today over at blog.pmarca.com describing different types of online platforms. Definitely worth a read. And that’s not just because it mentions Ning.

BMW Geeks is a Japanese language social network for BMW fanatics. They’ve translated almost all of their network into Kanji on their own. Now with the new Language Editor we just released, translating your social network on Ning into any language - or changing any of the text within a language - has never been easier.

Let’s start from the top…

Continue reading BMW Geeks: Using Your Own Language Translation…

Diego has been writing a series over at the Ning Developer Blog that highlights the technical evolution of the Ning Platform since we first launched it in October 2005.

If you’re interested in a behind-the-scenes look at our architecture and how we make technical decisions, this is the series for you.

In today’s installment, Diego describes our decision to move exclusively to standard HTML, CSS, and PHP 5 alongside our Platform APIs to power your own social network on Ning.

As Diego points out, by using standard programming languages and then making the code available to modify, people who know HTML, CSS, and standard PHP can quickly and easily customize (almost) every aspect of their networks on Ning. It also means that you don’t need to know anything other than HTML, CSS, and standard PHP to create entirely new web applications on the Ning Platform, but that’s for a later post.

For those of you who are not developers but still want to customize your social network, the fact that your own social network on Ning uses standard programming languages is also a very good thing. It expands the pool of technical people who can quickly learn what they need to know to customize your network. This means you can more easily get the technical help you need to create the exact right network for you.

For these (and a few other) reasons, when we went from the first generation of social web sites on Ning to your own social network for anything, we created it using our Platform APIs, HTML, CSS, and PHP 5. It’s another way we seek to ensure that you have the greatest chance of creating the best, right, unique social network for you today using Ning.

If there are any topics you’d like us to cover in the series, by all means leave a comment here or over on the Developer Blog. We love to address your questions or write about the things you care about.

Ning is an online platform for creating your own social network for anything. Being a platform means that, unlike other social networking services, you can request the source code running your social network on Ning and change not only how it looks but also how it works.

Your social network on Ning uses PHP, AJAX, and HTML, so if you - or someone you know - knows your way around those languages, you can customize any of the features on your social network or even add your own new feature. It’s that flexible. Or, extensible, if you’re trying to impress a technical person.

So, how do you get the source code running your network? Easy. Email us. We’ll send you the instructions for accessing your code. That’s Step One.

For Step Two, you’re going to want to keep getting the great updates and new releases we add to your social network weekly or every other week. When you get your own source code, you step off the train of automatic updates to your network. We do this to ensure that anything you customize or add to your network’s code isn’t wiped out by a new release. However, this doesn’t mean you don’t have access to new releases, it just means you need to manually add them.

We just posted instructions on how to merge new releases on the Ning Developer Blog.

Enjoy!

Our new “eBay Seller Photos” site makes it a snap to drop an embedded slideshow of your auction photos into your auction pages or anywhere else on the Internet It’s a version of our popular Ning Photos site that’s been juiced up with some eBay-specific features, all made possible by the eBay REST API.

Getting your own eBay Seller Photos site just takes a few seconds (just like getting your own copy of any Ning site) — visit http://ebaysellerphotos.ning.com/ and click on the big fat “Get your own” link. Enter your eBay User ID into the configuration panel of your new site, and then your site is automatically populated with photos from all your existing auctions. From there, you can add more photos, generate slideshow embeds for one auction or all your auctions, and edit which photos appear in which slideshows.

The eBay Seller Photos site is a modified version of Ning Photos. It uses a few new eBay REST API functions to work its eBay-related magic. If you’re an eBay API developer (or want to be one), the site is a great place to start to see how the basics of the REST API work. Inside your copy of the site, take a look at the file /widgets/photo/lib/helpers/Photo_EbayHelper.php to see what’s going on.

Especially when combined with PHP’s SimpleXML extension, the eBay REST API is a breeze to work with — the requests you make to eBay’s servers are just regular old GET requests, with assorted query string parameters describing what you’re looking for: info about a particular auction, all the auctions listed by a particular user, and so on. The responses are XML documents with a predictable structure, so pulling out the information you need with SimpleXML is easy.

As we’ve taken you through Ning’s latest features, we’ve repeatedly said that your Ning App is 100% programmable. What we mean is that if you want control, you’ve got it. The Apps we’ve created are varied and full-featured enough that most people clone, customize and use them happily without ever needing to dive into code. The difference between us and other web app services is that we give you the tools to do as much tweaking and building as you want. If there’s any feature in your App that you don’t like, you can change or get rid of it. If there’s something you want to enhance or add, you can do that too.

The new Ningbar with its customizability is just one feature in your App to control. Our URL rewriting tools and domain mapping premium feature give you total mastery over your App’s URLs. Our super-powerful open API gives you complete read-write access to content, user profiles and metadata across the whole of Ning. And with the full capabilities of PHP and Javascript at your disposal, with our own extra tools and built-in features on top, you’re limited only by your imagination.

You can find all the information you need in our Developer Documentation - have a wander through the tabs at the top of the page and you’ll see that it’s jam-packed with tips, examples and reference information. We also regularly give out useful nuggets in our Tech Blog. If you’ve got a question or have a great tip to share, join the growing community at our Developer Discussion Board. If you need an answer fast, jump onto the IRC channel.

I’ll say it again: you don’t have to write a line of code to create and run cool Apps on Ning. But 100% programmability means that we open up amazing possibilities for innovation and diversity, for a million ideas that we haven’t thought of. It means that we won’t stop you taking your Apps in whichever directions you want them to grow.

This weekend saw our eager-beaver engineering and operations teams roll out another release of the Ning Playground. The front-end differences are fairly small this time, but there are quite a few of them: for example, the Ningbar’s easier to get around with “Back” button support and a dedicated user search on the “People” panel. Other bits of user interface have been tightened up: you can now remove people from your friends list without blocking, and the “Compose Message” form is smarter too.

We also have some nifty goodies for developers: the new logical OR operator gives more power to your Content Store queries, as does the ability to use a friends list as a filter. Best of all, apps can now receive email and process photos and movies from MMS messages. For first sight of docs and examples for these features, subscribe to our Tech Blog if you haven’t already. Not only do we post the latest developer info there, it’s a constant source of tips and wisdom on all aspects of Ning App development - so dive in!

One area of our site that got a major upgrade last week was our Developer section. Now, you don’t need to be a developer to use Ning. But if you are a developer, we’ve created some special features just for you.

Roll special features…

Optional Developer Homepage

Flag yourself as a Developer by clicking the link near the top of the Developer page and manage your Apps with the Developer dashboard. You have a feed of our Tech Blog, 1-click access to your App Source Code, the option to search your code from here, and when you are browsing Apps on Ning, an easy link to View Source. Give it a try. If you don’t like it, you can always switch back to the default homepage.

A Skimmable Overview of the Ning Platform

Here’s a quick technical intro to Ning and how it works under the sheets.

Photo Sharing App Screencast

Watch a six-minute video showing how to build an App from scratch using Ning.

New Documentation

We’ve streamlined our Ning Documentation to be a bit more readable and easily referenceable (I think that’s a word).

Premium Features

Ok, so these aren’t exactly new, but when creating Apps on Ning, you can always choose the option to run your own Google or Yahoo ads, map your own domain name, hide your source code, and buy more storage and bandwidth.

And All the Stuff You Already Loved About Ning

No software downloads, no database to set up, and no sysadmin headaches.

Have a spin and let us know what else we can do to make developing on Ning even easier. We have some ideas, but would love to hear from you!

I wanted to take a moment and re-introduce Yoz Grahame and Phil McCluskey, our Ning Advocates. They have a hard job with a simple goal: ensure that both technical and non-technical users of Ning get what they need from the Playground as quickly and easily as possible.

Phil represents the great country of Australia and is the creator of such Ning hits as Confess!, Review It (to set up your own Google Map mash-up for reviews of anything), Ning Press (our cute little blog app) and Storyteller. Off Ning, Phil is also the creator of the FlickrFox extension for FireFox, rubhub, and author of Divide and Concur.

As for Yoz, he’s the only person at Ning with a Burning Man wedding under his belt. He’s also been involved in several renegade e-democracy services in the UK such as FaxYourMP.com and TheyWorkForYou.com, as well as commercial projects related to the works of Douglas Adams (author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). He’s also a top notch hacker who has created the spread of (highly alpha stage!) good cheer on Ning known as Sweeties.

Phil and Yoz are here to help you with the large and small things on Ning. If there is anything any of us can do to help make your experience on Ning smoother, drop us a line.

You’ve told us that we’re doing pretty darn good, but we know we can always do better. It’s not easy building a great service that empowers anyone to create and enjoy social web apps, but that’s the fun of it!