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After months of what seemed to be inactivity, the team at Ning has launched a massive update including their most ambitious feature yet, the Ning Bar. There are plenty of other updates to individual apps that haven't been released yet, but it's obvious that Ning is shaping up to be one of the major online services of this generation of web apps, if they can cure their one major failing, a lack of content.

With the addition of the Ning Bar, the service now has a centralised social aspect and messaging system (something that I felt was a glaring omission from the original release) and more importantly, a consistent way to manage and clone new apps. In addition to this, by highlighting the social aspect of the service within the Ning Bar, it encourages existing users to sign up their friends and hopefully clone new apps of their own.

There has been a lot of speculation as to when Ning is actually going to hit a 'critical mass' of users, enough to drive a large amount of people to sign up and start using the service. Originally, I assumed that this was a problem intrinsically associated with the iterative development style that management at Ning has decided to use - initially, there just wasn't that much to do with the service.

Fast forward a few months, and the home page tells a very different story. Ning is bigger and better than ever, so big in fact that the service now allows members to duplicate almost every popular web application on the market today, from MySpace to Craigslist, eBay to Blogger (and so many more).

Additionally, many of the original Ning apps have undergone massive overhauls since their initial release, both visually and in their feature-set, and now rival well known 'premium' services.

If you compare any of the popular applications today, there is one common trait they share: a large amount of content. Whether it is housing, blogs, auctions, photo sharing - a large and varied amount of content is critical to the success of the services. Many of the current generation of popular apps won their users over simply because the concepts and technology (AJAX, anyone?) were new at the time. Ning doesn't have this advantage, but they do have one major ace up their sleeve - their content database.

Having worked on a number of Ning applications (both theirs and my own), I can vouch for the fact that the concepts behind their database are not only cool to play with, they're revolutionary. Ning isn't the only company to recognise this either, both Google and Amazon have released initial shared database applications. The difference? Ning already has the framework for content creation implemented.

To give you a quick example of the power of a shared data store, imagine this scenario. If you have used Ning before, you may have cloned an application of your own - I started with the Review app. For the sake of this example, let's imagine that 3 people have cloned this app, User A to review Books, User B for Movies and finally, User C for Food.

Each Ning app automatically has the capability to use and interchange data between apps. Of course, there are many options of what you might do with this data, but to keep it simple I'll only address two - Aggregation and Suggestion.

Using the shared content store, another user (let's call him User N) could create a Review app of his own, but he's decided to go down a different path. Rather than create his own content, User N's app aggregates the reviews from every other app in the system. Thanks to metadata, it's reasonably simple to achieve this - all content tagged 'review' could automatically be added to his app.

Aggregating content like this is performing essentially the same task as a Search Engine, with a few advantages. Firstly, it's much more organised. Metadata works very well to sort through content, and negates the need for parsing/spidering every page for relevant content.

Secondly, more content = more users = more content. As the amount of content in Ning's database increases, so will the user-base and in turn, so will the amount of content being created for the system. This is essentially the same user model that social sites such as MySpace use - if there were only 5 users with little content on their pages, why would you come back? By aggregating existing content in the system, users are exposed to a much larger content base than if they visited the apps separately.

In case you're not following me yet, I believe that Ning should be User N. By creating aggregators for all popular content in their system and then promoting the aggregators (rather than the individual sites), there is a much higher chance of users flocking to the system en masse.

One other major feature afforded by the shared content store is being able to suggest new content for users based on their (and others') viewing habits across multiple applications. The primary advantage of this is community building. If Ning's new aim is to become a truly social service (originally, the idea was that Ning would not have social elements built into the system, rather, they would have applications have this functionality built into them), what better way to connect compatible users with each other than by the most relevant data available - their viewing habits.

Using suggestion and aggregation in order to distribute users to new application would be a powerful combination for Ning in their efforts to bolster their userbase dramatically, and really differentiate themselves from the crowd as a major player in the social networking/applications business.

So finally, if you haven't checked out Ning since it's first release -- I really suggest you do, even if you have no development experience whatsoever. Judging by the quality of their current release and rapid development cycle, this is really one of the must use services of the next generation of web apps.

After months of what seemed to be inactivity, the team at Ning has launched a massive update including their most ambitious feature yet, the Ning Bar. There are plenty of other updates to individual apps that haven't been released yet, but it's obvious that Ning is shaping up to be one of the major online services of this generation of web apps, if they can cure their one major failing, a lack of content.

With the addition of the Ning Bar, the service now has a centralised social aspect and messaging system (something that I felt was a glaring omission from the original release) and more importantly, a consistent way to manage and clone new apps. In addition to this, by highlighting the social aspect of the service within the Ning Bar, it encourages existing users to sign up their friends and hopefully clone new apps of their own.

There has been a lot of speculation as to when Ning is actually going to hit a 'critical mass' of users, enough to drive a large amount of people to sign up and start using the service. Originally, I assumed that this was a problem intrinsically associated with the iterative development style that management at Ning has decided to use - initially, there just wasn't that much to do with the service.

Fast forward a few months, and the home page tells a very different story. Ning is bigger and better than ever, so big in fact that the service now allows members to duplicate almost every popular web application on the market today, from MySpace to Craigslist, eBay to Blogger (and so many more).

Additionally, many of the original Ning apps have undergone massive overhauls since their initial release, both visually and in their feature-set, and now rival well known 'premium' services.

If you compare any of the popular applications today, there is one common trait they share: a large amount of content. Whether it is housing, blogs, auctions, photo sharing - a large and varied amount of content is critical to the success of the services. Many of the current generation of popular apps won their users over simply because the concepts and technology (AJAX, anyone?) were new at the time. Ning doesn't have this advantage, but they do have one major ace up their sleeve - their content database.

Having worked on a number of Ning applications (both theirs and my own), I can vouch for the fact that the concepts behind their database are not only cool to play with, they're revolutionary. Ning isn't the only company to recognise this either, both Google and Amazon have released initial shared database applications. The difference? Ning already has the framework for content creation implemented.

To give you a quick example of the power of a shared data store, imagine this scenario. If you have used Ning before, you may have cloned an application of your own - I started with the Review app. For the sake of this example, let's imagine that 3 people have cloned this app, User A to review Books, User B for Movies and finally, User C for Food.

Each Ning app automatically has the capability to use and interchange data between apps. Of course, there are many options of what you might do with this data, but to keep it simple I'll only address two - Aggregation and Suggestion.

Using the shared content store, another user (let's call him User N) could create a Review app of his own, but he's decided to go down a different path. Rather than create his own content, User N's app aggregates the reviews from every other app in the system. Thanks to metadata, it's reasonably simple to achieve this - all content tagged 'review' could automatically be added to his app.

Aggregating content like this is performing essentially the same task as a Search Engine, with a few advantages. Firstly, it's much more organised. Metadata works very well to sort through content, and negates the need for parsing/spidering every page for relevant content.

Secondly, more content = more users = more content. As the amount of content in Ning's database increases, so will the user-base and in turn, so will the amount of content being created for the system. This is essentially the same user model that social sites such as MySpace use - if there were only 5 users with little content on their pages, why would you come back? By aggregating existing content in the system, users are exposed to a much larger content base than if they visited the apps separately.

In case you're not following me yet, I believe that Ning should be User N. By creating aggregators for all popular content in their system and then promoting the aggregators (rather than the individual sites), there is a much higher chance of users flocking to the system en masse.

One other major feature afforded by the shared content store is being able to suggest new content for users based on their (and others') viewing habits across multiple applications. The primary advantage of this is community building. If Ning's new aim is to become a truly social service (originally, the idea was that Ning would not have social elements built into the system, rather, they would have applications have this functionality built into them), what better way to connect compatible users with each other than by the most relevant data available - their viewing habits.

Using suggestion and aggregation in order to distribute users to new application would be a powerful combination for Ning in their efforts to bolster their userbase dramatically, and really differentiate themselves from the crowd as a major player in the social networking/applications business.

So finally, if you haven't checked out Ning since it's first release -- I really suggest you do, even if you have no development experience whatsoever. Judging by the quality of their current release and rapid development cycle, this is really one of the must use services of the next generation of web apps.