In Defence of Ning
Mike Arrington of TechCrunch had a pretty critical take on Ning at Ning - R.I.P?. I think Mike has set the expectations way too high for Ning. After all, the service is barely out 3 months, and this is a tough problem to solve, as we can tell from working on Zoho Creator, which attempts to solve a similar problem.
Ning has gotten many things right. I personally thought their mash-up support is quite good, and is a role model for us. Yes, the service requires PHP to do anything serious, but I am sure over time the areas where coding will be required will be whittled down, particularly as the service gains critical mass. After all, the more code that is written on Ning, the les code a future developer has to write. So Ning is off to a very good start - and that is the main point. This whole thing is so young that it is not fair to expect anyone to get it all figured out.
And a broader point: Ning also got hit for the star power of Marc Andressen. After all, even with Marc’s magical presence, code just doesn’t drop straight from the sky for Ning developers - they still have to do all the difficult work of getting this right. I sympathize with them for having to do that under such a glare of publicity. So Mike, cut them some slack.
Keep the fight alive, Ning guys, we hope to learn from you!