Six Sentences is the social network for writers, fans and friends of the blog with the same name. Members of the network revel in the opportunity to discuss the six-sentence stories that they read and write. So what can YOU say in six sentences?

The forum discussions are the perfect place to talk about the newly released 6SV1. Network Creator and Six Sentences Editor-in-Chief, Robert McEvily, constantly lends his voice to discussion. His efforts keep the flow of discussions, photos and videos constant.

So take look at some fantastic short stories and think about what you could say in Six Sentences!

Book Place is a network for authors and readers to connect and a place where promotion is encouraged!

Network Creator Morgan Mandel is an author herself and prominently features her book Girl of My Dreams on her profile page. A funny take on current television, it’s the story of a reality-show contestant who falls in love with the show’s producer, rather than the eligible millionaire.

Authors use forum discussions to post updates on the progress of their books and to share exciting news about reviews and publishing deals. Members have also created groups to discuss different aspects of the writing process, from getting started to being reviewed.

Members also use photos to promote their books, posting book covers and comments. The photos section becomes a sort of catalog of authors on the network, showcasing the wide variety of writers that participate. From the juvenile fiction work of Likai Chen and his recent Shuisheng the Mallard to Betty Ann Harris’ mystery Eureka Point.

So for all you writers out there looking to connect with other authors and promote yourself as well, Book Place is the place for you!

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.

True software platforms serve many different constituencies. That’s the point of creating a platform. They are programmable. Anyone can use them to create exactly what they want. As a result, programmable platforms can be used successfully by companies, start-ups, and individuals alike.

Ning is a software platform for creating social networks for anything. We view our mission as bringing “enterprise” flexibility, scalability, performance, and customization to everyone, including companies and other start-ups.

I’ve started to see in a few places the contention that because Ning is easy to use, we must not be flexible or programmable enough. While we’re happy we’ve successfully made Ning incredibly easy to use, it has never been at the expense of freedom, flexibility, or control by companies or individuals.

Enabling freedom at every level is hard. Making it easy for anyone to use is next to impossible. We’ve done both successfully. As you can tell, we like challenges

To recreate what we’ve built:

1. Start with a platform architecture and its requirements, including OS features, programmability, and horizontal scalability.
2. Recruit a world-class systems software team capable of building a new operating system.
3. Quietly commit 2 ½ years to R&D.
4. Write half a million lines of code.
5. Launch a programmable platform. Host it.
6. Layer on top of the platform a “killer app” that can be used by anyone to create their own social networks for anything.
7. Rapidly iterate with developers and Network Creators to understand what you want along 3 types of customization: point and click options, appearance changes, and logic (or code) changes.
8. Rapidly release new features on 2-week release cycles.
9. Ensure performance at scale for large, high volume social networks. Then add a lot of them.

When you peel back the layers, Ning is a software platform that can scale any application running on it to millions of members and page views. (Almost) every aspect of social networks on Ning is customizable. More uniquely, you can create entirely new social web applications on the Ning Platform with the documentation that we make readily available to anyone.

There is nothing cookie cutter about that.

One of the things that drives us here at Ning is the belief that freedom - especially in software - wins. When people get a taste of the freedom to change every aspect of the software they use, the genie is out of the bottle. When given the choice, people want the freedom to create, customize, and change things. People want to control their own destiny.

We saw this in the early Internet with online services like AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. They were fantastic insofar as early email, chat rooms, and pages previewed what was possible online. But when people were offered the freedom to create their own websites - or, as analogy, their own AOL - they took it in droves. AOL continued to serve as a fantastic funnel for people coming online but the web overtook it in terms of sheer size because it gave people the freedom to create their own worlds, not just join AOL’s. The web enabled the freedom to create in a way that, as an online service, AOL simply couldn’t.

If a service starts off as a “walled garden” - with a narrow and fixed view of what people can do on its service - it’s not a platform, at least not a programmable platform. A programmable platform enables a person to change the features on the network directly. Don’t like how your network on Ning displays friends? No problem, you can change it. Want to add sticky notes on the discussion forum or a wiki to your network ahead of us offering it? Go for it. On Ning, you can change (almost) everything on your social network because we give you the application code to modify and use as you like.

Continue reading Freedom at Every Level…

A few weekends ago, I read an incredibly dry book on platforms called Invisible Engines. Even the name is dry.

They took an amazing topic and made it boring. Platforms are fascinating and shouldn’t be sold short with only academic or technical treatment. While I won’t get a book deal out of it, here’s why I love platforms.

A platform is typically defined as:

“a software program that makes services available to other software programs through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).”

This is an accurate definition but to me it doesn’t communicate the full power of a platform. Platforms are the cornerstone of software innovation for one reason:

Platforms give everyone the freedom to create what they want.

A platform means people can create, extend, and customize their application to meet their own particular needs. The result is a thousand or million variations that are the exact right perfect thing for you.

With a platform, you don’t have to appeal to the company behind the service for the features you want. If you have the time and the inclination, you can build them yourself.

It’s the software equivalent of Home Depot.

Understanding this powerful, yet simple benefit of platforms has historically been limited to the realm of developers. Yet, it’s one of the primary reasons behind the web as we know and love it today. The web browser (and HTML) was a platform that enabled anyone to create a website.

When we started, we wanted to enable a diversity of social networks the same way the web browser enabled millions of different websites.

We wanted people to have the opportunity to create their own social networks and to make them whatever and whomever they wanted them to be. As a result, it didn’t make sense to build anything less than a platform.

Like any platform, some things are easier to do than others on Ning, but at its core, almost anything is possible.

What is and isn’t a platform

Doom is a platform. Second Life is a platform. You can program the way either one of these games work. In fact, they give you a copy of the code running it so that you can change it at will. That’s a platform.

MySpace is not a platform. MySpace doesn’t let you program it. MySpace doesn’t give you APIs. You can’t change any of the navigation links on MySpace, you can’t change how they display your friends, and if you wanted to add a new feature to your MySpace page, say a marketplace, you’re out of luck.

Even if MySpace is not a platform, what people have done with the limited freedom on MySpace is inspiring. The diversity and self-expression of MySpace pages is profound.

True platforms let people take this freedom to dramatically greater lengths, but any freedom is good in my book.

The only book I think captures the power of platforms is Masters of Doom and I think that’s because I just really like their story. Not only is it a great personal tale of entrepreneurship, creativity, and the reality of start-ups and doing something new, it describes a platform with a Hello Kitty example. I love it.

So you’re looking at our whizzy new Ningbar and the new friends list features and all the other fun stuff, and you’re thinking, “Well, that’s all very lovely, but how’s this thing going to help me create and run my Apps? And more importantly, what if I want it to just go away?”

If you want the Ningbar gone, it’s gone. But it’s so useful to App owners, you’ll probably want to keep it around. Let me explain…

We’ve put a whole load of work into making the experience of creating and maintaining your App as smooth and easy as possible. As an example, check out the Get Your Own! button - the new interface to App cloning. (You’ll see it in Apps that aren’t yours.) When you find an App you really like and say, “I want one of those,” it’s now smoother than ever to get one for yourself. Thanks to this button, the process of naming, customizing and running your own Apps is wonderfully hassle-free and even more fun to play with.

Now you’ve got your App, it’s running and people are using it; how does the Ningbar help you now? Check out the Manage panel. From the first click you’ve got an instant view of your App stats and a bunch of your App’s busiest users - plus, you can send a broadcast message in a couple of clicks. If you dive into the “Appearance” section you can play with your App’s color scheme and tweak it until it’s just right. You can also jump to your App’s settings and to the content manager, which has been neatened up and made snappier.

And that’s just the stuff you get by default. You want to chop up the Ningbar, add your own custom panels and tweak the search? Be my guest. And don’t forget all the nifty features it gives your users - letting them sign in, make new friends from interactions in your App, check their messages and more. Like I said, you can get rid of the whole thing if you like - but why would you want to?

Here at Ning, we love hooking stuff together in weird and wonderful ways, resulting in eccentric-but-useful marriages such as eBay & Google Maps, Ajax & kittens and the coffee machine & Diego’s brain. We love helping our community mix things up too; this is why we created the web services skeleton apps and take part in the whole web mashup scene. And it’s also why we’ve created the new, super-powerful Ning REST API - unleashing the raw untrammelled awesomeness of your Ning Apps to the entire internet.

If you haven’t encountered them before, web service APIs allow the use of a web app in ways beyond having to visit the site in a browser. With the Ning REST API (previously mentioned as the Atom API), you can pull content out of your App, embed it in other web sites, subscribe to it in a feed reader… and do whatever you want with it. Even better, with the latest release of the API, the flow goes both ways - you can upload content to your App with external software. (If you want to try, you can use your favorite programming language.

As you can see, we’ve used plenty of existing web services APIs at here at Ning. So when it came to our own, we had tons of good ideas to throw in, and we went with them all:

Widgets ahoy!

Want to embed Ning content in your external blog or website? No problem. Our API makes it easy to use your Apps in new and interesting ways.

It’s standards-based

As the name implies, the API is based on href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer">REST principles; HTTP like it’s meant to be. When it came to data formats, we went with the best: the
Atom syndication
format and publishing
protocol. (We’re planning on adding support for other formats soon too.)

Feeds are busting out all over:

Since we’re using the Atom syndication format, it means that our content comes out as feeds you can subscribe to. To create a feed, it’s just a matter of typing a URL.

Export and Import

You want to take your own backup of your App’s content? Hey, we can understand that. Our API makes it simple, and with the latest release you can also send data the other way.

Custom feeds that search, with no code

The URLs that generate feeds can contain queries that search your App’s data or the entire Ning Content Store. Want to get a feed of everything with a particular tag? Not only can you do that, there’s no code required - see our examples.

Get information about Apps, Profiles and Tags:

You can pull out all kinds of interesting metadata about your App. This page shows our favorite: a feed that lists an App’s clones.

Create, Update, Delete

As the App owner, you now have the power to do anything with your App content remotely that you can do with App code. In fact, there doesn’t even need to be any app code: want a free gigabyte of API-accessible, searchable storage for structured data? Just create an empty Ning App, and you’ve got it.

Treats for Javascript junkies

One of the formats we’ll be adding soon is JSON, which makes data-handling easier for Javascript. Can’t wait? Neither could David (our main PHP guru), so he created BadgerFish, which will turn any XML into JSON. (It’s such a good idea, people are already translating it to other languages)

Lots of demos and docs

Here are the demos. Need the specs? We have all the documentation you might want.

Add it all up, and you have a strong contender for the most powerful and flexible API on the web, and it’s just waiting for you to dive in and experiment. No wonder we call it a Playground!

There are many reasons we refer to Ning as a Playground, but the freedom to experiment is a key one. This is why I jumped for joy when we released our Backup & Restore features last month: they’re giant Undo/Redo buttons for your apps. While we do a lot to make it easy for users to jump into building and customising apps, the idea of tweaking complex code is still a daunting one. If you know that any mistakes can be undone in a couple of clicks, it makes it more tempting to be adventurous with your code (and we like adventurers).

To get to your app’s backups, click the Backup and Restore link in your app’s File Manager. There you’ll find two different kinds of backup:

• Permanent backups are named backups of your code, and can be made by hitting the link marked Create Permanent Backup. They stick around for good. If you’re planning on making some major changes to your app, it only takes a second to make a backup, and it may save your skin if you accidentally delete something important. It’s also useful for flipping between two different versions of your app if you’re having trouble choosing between them (as often happens with redesigns). Permanent backups are never deleted by the system unless you specifically request it.
• Even if you forget to make a backup before you start hacking away, you can still revert your changes. Temporary backups are made automatically when the system notices you editing your code (whether in the web interface or over SFTP). While you’re editing, the system will take a backup every half hour. Your app stores a maximum of fifteen temporary backups - when you exceed that number, the oldest will be deleted. Temporary backups are also automatically taken when doing Merge and Reclone operations (of which we’ll explain more soon) so that they’re easy to undo.

If you ever need to retrieve a backup, just click the Restore link next to the backup you want. If you want to see exactly what a particular backup contains, click the Compare link - this contains a particularly nifty feature which shows you the differences between files in the backup and those currently in your app.

A couple more points to note:

• Backups are stored by us, and only take a moment to create. So you don’t need to download anything to your hard drive.
• Backups only contain code, not content objects. If you decide to delete all the cat pictures from your Photo Sharing app, we can’t help you get them back. (But we can suggest a source of solace)

Tip: if you are not easily impressed, in high school, or a technical person, skip this post. You guys already know everything here. But for other folks that aren’t big into the code, you might find the ease and simplicity of this fun little plaything a great place to start your foray into code.

Yesterday I coded my first web app — ever. It took one line of code. Now, to either you technical folks or high school kids, this isn’t news. For me, however, it was a milestone.

Here’s what I did:

1. I created a blank app on Ning.
2. Into this app, I created a new file. At first I called it, you tube.php, but that didn’t work so well. By looking at another web app on Ning, I realized perhaps I should call it index.php. That seemed to work.
3. Into this index.php file, I dropped in this line of code:
   <object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uPLe7u2bHuA"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uPLe7u2bHuA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

4. I saved it.

Lo and behold, it worked!!!! One click to create my own app and one line of magic code from You Tube to add my favorite video of 2005.

I love the Internet.