Interesting post about developing a facebook app.

Quoted: It did drive home the point that we’ve all felt that there’s something problematic about the complete ownership of personal data by Facebook. That control, combined with a hair-trigger banning without warning and a probably overwhelmed appeals process, is scary.

Facebook applications are getting some great adoption. It's only been a few weeks and these and the top 10 most popular applications - most with over 1 million users (I think the total Facebook user base is about 33M now).

1. iLike - 2.9M
2. Top Friends (Slide) - 2.7M
3. Movies (Flixster) - 1.9M
4. Mobile (Facebook) - 1.8M
5. Graffiti (Suzman and Kantor) - 1.8M
6. Horoscopes (RockYou) - 1.7M
7. Fortune Cookie (Ballance) - 1.7M
8. X Me (Shen and Green) - 1.4M
9. Slideshows (RockYou) - 0.7M
10. Video (Facebook) - 0.7M

Quoted: Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Ning's developer documentation. This pre-dates the March release. This is the PHP based technical specs, all new apps would have to use before they produced the more user-friendly site designers.

I believe all of this older "classic" documentation still applies - and has not yet been superseded by the new documentation site.

Architectural Overview of Ning. Note that you can extend your social network with custom PHP and JavaScript (as well as layout templates and CSS).

Quoted: ning architecture ning platform creating your own social networks and social applications ning content store semi-structured relational database stores all content contributed social networks and applications across ning.

Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini talk about the Ning platform.

Marc defines "Social Network":

- user profiles
- users publishing and contributing
- people connecting with people

Features of Ning Includes:blogs, discussions, videos, photos, friends, messaging, tagging, RSS, REST API, php and javascript API, apps can share content with other networks.

30,000 Social networks running today (before Tuesday's launch).

Storage quotas beyond a few Gig incur charges much like Amazon S3.

Suggestions for things that should have "a social network":
- political campaigns
- churches
- religions

Mac talks about his startups: about Loud Cloud, Opsware ($100M revenue).

Built this playhouse for Chris when he was a kid. We planned it together; it was fun to see it take shape. Still standing behind our old Bothell house.