Marc Canter has blogged a new open mobile SMS service: (“a way for any web service to tie into SMS and get their data sent to cell phones. OH MY GOD – you mean open source has come to mobile services?”), so check out 411Sync.
On another loosely-related note, Tony Hirst has alerted me to the just-out-the-door Ning, which Stowe Boyd, Marc Canter, and numerous others are blogging about like crazy.
With Ning…You Can Create
For any City => Your own take on Craigslist®
For any Passion => Your own take on Match®
For any Interest => Your own take on Zagat®
For any Event => Your own take on FlickrTM
For any School => Your own take on FacebookTM
For any Topic => Your own take on del.icio.usTM
For any Mammal => Your own take on Hot or Not®
Sign up. Build new social apps. Use new social apps.
Every app is open source, and their mantra is ‘clone -> mix -> run’:
One of the unique things about the app you were just visiting is the ability for others to view the source code running it — and any running app — on the Ning Playground. You can use this ability to View Source for inspiration in you own apps or, better yet, to simply create your own copy of this app. Your new, cloned app works the same as the original. Only now you can set it up for any location, interest, topic, or language you’d like.
Great idea: this philosophy, after all, is what made the web grow so explosively, with developers of all abilities engaged in a feeding frenzy based on what they saw from other sites: cloning, mixing, and running their own. The entry bar is a little higher with PHP (the lingua franca for Ning apps) than it was for HTML, but that doesn’t matter; if the philosophy pans out, we’re going to see some interesting apps coming out of this.
I like to think of this approach, that they call a ‘playground’ as an ‘Open Social Software Sandpit’.
Technorati Tags: ning, 411sync, clone, mix, run, social.software, sandpit, playground, open.source
