Invent or Reinvent The Wheel With Ning!

Not too long ago on either Digg or Del.icio.us, I heard of a new website named Ning that has several social application websites available for use. 

What I mean by "social application websites" is that you have the ability to freely use the concept or programming used by well known websites like eBay, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and others that have a social community established and maintained by simply using the websites.

The kicker of this concept is that you can actually create your own social networking website or clone the framework and infrastructure from an existing application found on the website if you have obtained a free developer's account status.  Cloning an existing application means that you do not have to know any programming basically and can simply change the colors and name of the existing application website to be off and running with your own idea.

I registered to obtain the developer's status and although there was an initial backlog, my status was upgraded yesterday.  I believe that Ning will be granting new requests for developer status at a faster pace.

A ton of ideas flowed through my head immediately upon discovering Ning and although I made the mistake of not writing them all down, there are more than enough ideas posted and in use on the website to discover new ways to improve the communities that I have created and/or will create.

Last night I logged in and saw that the developer status was immediately built into my free account and I proceeded to create an application entitled "Spit The Next Line" by cloning an existing one. 

Spit The Next Line is a simple idea where the users will create an ongoing hip hop rap by adding one or two lines or even another verse to a new or existing rap.  It was the first idea that came to mind with the shortest time to create it to actually create even though I had other ideas.

I changed the settings and near the end of the process, I noticed that the new word I was using (line) was an actual part of the programming within the application.  It was getting pretty late as well.  As a result, I knew that I had created a bug to be found throughout the entire application and it probably would not work as planned.

Being that my skills in programming are decent but not sufficient enough to know the critical difference on how to debug the application with such a simple-but-complex-error like this, I discovered that you can actually delete an application.  So I did and started all over again.  Now I think that it probably would have worked still, but hey why spend too much time on it when it did not take a lot of time in the first place?

Check Ning out for yourself, create or clone an application, and let me know.  I know many communities that would greatly benefit from such an idea.

This time around I am going to leave the terminology alone on this first experiment and hopefully the users will get the idea and use it anyway.

With a website like Ning, you can save a ton of money in programming hours and dollars, and create a new concept website or reinvent the wheel without spending a lot of time, energy, and effort, and dollars to do it.  This is Web 2.0 if I ever heard of it;)

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