Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / Meet Ning with Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen
Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:
[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]
Meet Ning: Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen
- Gina Bianchini:
- we want to empower people to create their own social networks.
- the biggest thing is that rather than having your stuff sitting on Flickr branded or Yahoo or Google branded sites, you can put all of the stuff together so that you can have it branded as a complete social network with your own brand. The “me” photo/video/blog site.
- By December – fully customizable / configurable build-your-own social network administration tool.
- Andreessen:
- this is allowing the web to fragment and specialize (rather than just using one-size-fits-all services such as MySpace.) This is our big bet.
- [This was the only key point in their presentation. People want to build “the cute fuzzy bunny community”, they want it all in one place, and they want it branded as their site, not somebody else’s. I agree with their key principle here.]
- Ning is completely programmable. Full REST API; every piece of the interface is customizable; you can modify the source code so that at any level (interface, API, code level) it can be customized.
- We are disrupting MySpace and YouTube six months after they hit the big time
- [Which begs the question: who will disrupt you 3 months after Ning launches?]