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For the past four months, I’ve been hard at work on several projects that, until now, I haven’t been able to discuss. What I’m happy to announce now is that 24HL’s playground for app development, Ning, is out there in public beta! You can see my work in Bubrub, a Yubnub clone for Ning (my first Ning project), and also the NingPets network of apps.

Describing the way that NingPets works is a good way to introduce the capabilities of the playground, as well as how I believe that app developers will likely collaborate and build interesting structures of apps that can communicate with one another via the shared content store.

The way it works is that there are user-cloneable “pet” applications which can easily be created for any type of pet imaginable. I started with the app called Bulldogster. To start with, you can add bulldog profiles with icon JPEGs, modify bulldog metadata, add friends/family, and see what other Bulldogs have similar attributes. I provide about 5-6 custom attributes (like “Favorite Dog Park” or “Favorite Food”) aside from name, short bio, birthday, gender, and icon, which help each pet owner customize their profile online.

Here’s where it gets interesting: if you don’t care about Bulldogs, but you love African Greys, you just sign up as a beta developer, clone the Bulldogster application, then use the web-based setup form to change the configuration of the app to be all about African Greys. The header and the app is automatically completely customized, and you can also edit the custom attributes you care about for African Greys. You’ll be able to keep a little “Africangreyster” Blog on the frontpage, and not only that, but you can extend your app with plugins hosted on Ning.

The way that the plugin architecture that I wrote works is a subject worthy of its own blog post, but here’s a general overview. Each app for a particular pet can install plugins hosted on Ning itself, and can pick whatever version of the plugin that it wants. Instead of having to copy files and/or upload plugins to the server, you just use a web-based Plugin Control panel that automatically communicates with my plugin hosting app to show and let you install plugins directly! My first plugin that I made available is called “NingPet War!” which is a direct conversion of the “ThisOrThat” app into a pet plugin. You can easily run a cuteness contest on your app, or have an intelligence showdown between African Greys.

The super interesting thing about all of this is that because all NingPets apps are cloned and configured through Ning content objects, you can have a parent application like NingPets that knows about every active NingPet app’s content on the system. Thus, you can browse around all the pet profiles uploaded, and make friends between pets sitting on different apps. More interesting functionality can then be built into the parent app, which gets the advantage of having access to all the apps on the playground.

As you can see, there are some unique, cool advantages to developing on the Ning playground.

I’m really happy to finally be able to talk about this in public, as it’s been a pretty cool ride the past few months. Everyone working on Ning has been extremely thoughtful and very interested in feedback that we developers have been giving during the private beta. It’s been amazing to see how far the playground has come in the past 4 months, and I can’t wait to see what becomes of the apps we’ve been working on. Best of luck, guys!

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