Three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet - in Mike's words

Please read this insanely useful article written by Mike Anderson.

Mike has described 3 kinds of platforms for web services.

Level 3 platform is the most difficult to build by the platform-provider and is very easy to integrate and use from an end-user’s-perspective. While, Level 1 platform is easiest to build by the platform-provider and difficult to integrate from an end-user’s-perspective. Most people build level-1 platforms – like whenever you see the work “API” it actually means a Level 1 platform. Exception is Facebook and Ning, which are building a Level-2 and Level-3 API respectively. Level 3 is really an API nirvana, and requires very good architectural planning from the platform-provider side. I can imagine some API evolving from a Level 1 to a Level 3; but there aren’t any examples of such APIs; also the code written for Level 1 API, will probably be difficult to use in Level 3, unless there is again some very good architectural planning.

A must read for anybody who codes!

Read on …

Ning is Cool!

Ning is Cool, but ... has some bugs.

They have made an excellent UI, fully features, perhaps too much for a starter, but great set of features. Sigining up is easy, setting up a social network is easy. I setup one myself (http://rocknmetal.ning.com/). Ning did go down for several hours yesterday, so I have interrupted while I was entering data. Ning remembered my settings :-)

I got a couple of errors when I tested it with FF 2.0.0.2 today:
on page http://rocknmetal.ning.com/main/admin/appProfile
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /apps/9/04D/04F/socialnetworkmain/widgets/index/controllers/AdminController.php on line 72

I logged in to change my network settings in FF, and got a somewhat weird screen, with text overlapping ads. I have posted this screen here (I have blurred part of the text). Also on FF, there was no submit button at the end of the settings page, so I shifted to IE7.

One suggestion to Ning team will be to go little slow on placing Ads; give the site some time to let networks do contextual analysis on the page.