Nat at O'Reilly shares some interesting thoughts about NIng in a post entitled A Week in the Valley: Ning.

He covers its basic structure...

At the bottom level of Ning is a toolkit of Web 2.0 services (authentication, data store, tagging) made available through RESTian APIs. Anybody can use these, whether they use the rest of Ning or not. These are implemented in Java 5 (no J2EE), running on more than 20 Solaris boxes using virtualization with Solaris zones. Fast, and secure (no security violations since the public beta launched: zero).

Next level up is language bindings. PHP is the only language available in public yet. They have libraries that give a PHP interface to the RESTian services. They have Ruby working internally, will roll it out this summer. Language bindings are easy—the hard part is the sandbox that keeps applications secure. They picked PHP because a lot of people know it, but discovered its sandboxing was too thin for their use and then spent a long time making it secure. JVM will be the next bindings after Ruby.

Then, within each language, are the applications. Applications are trivially clonable (they now call this 'Get Your Own', but cloning is how still I think of it), which is the Ning way of letting every person or community have their own photo album, restaurant reviews, Craig's List, etc.

... its APIs...

Their underlying APIs are not just RESTian, they're Atom. Yes, they're very close to GData. GData is Atom + Atom Publishing + A9 Stored Queries. Ning has Atom + Atom Publishing + homebrewed query syntax. Near enough. Atom is something to watch for programmers, not for civilians. It's proving to be RSS for serious programmers (RSS is RSS for weekend web jockies) (I look forward to being burnt in effigy by the RSS devotees).

... and on its use of CC licensing...

But even more interesting is their licensing issue. If I can trivially get to data from another site, how do I know what license was attached to it? It's not metadata at this point, though they'll make it so when it becomes more of an issue. For now, they say 'anything you upload has this CC license on it, don't upload if you don't want to license it so'. This has the consequence that they can't delete an image when the owner wants it gone: they have to delete it only when the owner *and all the licensees* want it gone. In other words, if I put your kitten picture on my page, it won't go away when you delete it. You've given me a license and I haven't asked for it to go away. Interesting quirk.

I had tended to think that Ning was too hard for normal people and too restrictive for geeks, so I was not sure about the use case. But this great review suggests it is worth thinking about again. It is probably way ahead of its time, but so what. It's a great idea.