DanLin.net

Ning is a company that has been around for about 2 years now and this week they finally launched a product that is worth discussing. They are near the forefront of commoditizing social networks by allowing people to create vertical social networks based on their interests. Conceptually this is pretty cool and as it is free, it might have put fiveacross out of business had they not been acquired by Cisco earlier this month.

From a development and design perspective, the product is very beautifully made with gratuitous Web 2.0 UI features. Usability is very intuitive and setting up a social network is literally a few clicks away. I tested the service and created my own trendy Web 2.0 social network called ThunderAndLight.Ning.com.

Today’s social networks are like the message forums of the 90’s and the blogs of 2003. Ning to me is the PHPBB and Wordpress of social networks. The only difference is that it is free but not open source. I can see a lot of small organizations like schools and churches begin building social networks of their own using services like this. Ning’s business model currently looks like purely advertising driven and they are betting on the vertically integrated model to drive enough traffic to build revenue.

Founded by Mosaic co-creator Marc Andreessen and his protege and Stanford Business School grad Gina Bianchini (Link to Flickr profile), cash and industry connections are not likely gonna be problems. Let’s just hope this vertical market thing lives up to its hype.

This is what I want to know. Why is myspace STILL the king of social networks? I can understand when there weren’t too many choices but is that still the case today? Just today I got over a dozen SPAM bulletin messages on my myspace bulletin board in my account. They are all from people I know who would not participate in this kind of solicitation. For example, I know my wife’s cousin who’s currently serving in the Navy in Florida is not really trying to get me to click to a site from myspace to claim a year worth of free pizza.

Neither is my friend Rodrigo inviting me to a HUGE myspace party by linking to a fake myspace profile to request the address where the HREF actually points to an IP address in Hong Kong.

Are all these people’s accounts compromised? Is it the handy work of the Colorado spammer Richter (as discussed on RB #50) ? Whatever it is, its not looking pretty right now. If myspace doesn’t find a real (non-litigious) way of dealing with the spam issue, it is just another reason for people to stop using it and jump to the next best thing. Whatever that is.

Update: Tips have been temporarily removed

Blake Ross of Firefox has lost trust in the ‘don’t be evil’ search and advertising giant Google. In a recent blog post on blakeross.com, he describes how Google is foregoing is prior position of allowing the cream to surface to the top in lieu of promoting its own tools. The example he uses is searching for the phrase ‘photo sharing’ in Google returns a tip on the top of the page promoting their photo sharing tool Picasa.

Although Picasa is a fine tool for sharing photos but it is certainly not the best of breed. This probably has some to do with Blake’s new company Parakey whose goal is to make media sharing and various common Web tasks seamless to the normal Web user.

I wrote a little script that allows you to display the photos from any Flickr RSS feed. The phot album you see to the side of this blog is using this little script. It uses the lastRSS class to parse the feed written by Vojtech Semecky from lastRSS.webdot.cz as well as javascript library from script.aculo.us. It has some nice caching features built in to speed things up a little. Enjoy.

Download RSS Flickr Photo Album version 0.02

(Requires PHP4)

I wrote a little simple script that allows me to serve my MP3 library over the net so I can stream it from whereever I am. I use it to stream my 100 GB music collection to my Treo 700p via EVDO. I essentail can walk around any major metropolitan area in the U.S. and access every song in my collection through my phone including creating dynamic, on-the-go playlists.

I decided to share it with the world since I use it so much. It’s pretty basic but it has some nice features already.

1. No database required
2. Dynamic playlist creation
3. Multiuser support via cookies
4. Supports common mp3 players (iTunes, Winamp, etc..)
5. Flash-based Web player (I didn’t make the swf file)
6. Works with Smartphones such as the Treo 700p over EVDO

Check it out and feedback is welcome as long as they are constructive…

Download the MP3 Streaming Server Script

Requirements: PHP 4, Apache 1.3, Flash Player (To use the Web-based player)
Should work on all platforms. Tested on SuSE Linux 9.