Marc Andreessen, Ning and Reger.com
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Marc Andreessen was in the audience for my little demo at the Web 2.0 conference. (Mom, he's the guy who cofounded Netscape.) He shot me an email, I replied, he asked a few questions and I wrote this email (now a blog entry) as a reply. I'm still a little starstruck, after watching
Bob Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds for so long, but it's fun and I love what he's doing with
Ning. So, here's the email, shared because a) I want to show off that I can send email to Marc Andreessen and b) it turned out to include a pretty good summary of thoughts on Reger.com, microformats and the like. ]
Hi Marc!
I'm in close contact with
Tantek and
Marc Canter. They're doing great stuff. Truly. They're trying to capture the big hitters in the microformat world... events, vcard, reviews. If you take a late 2005 microformat usage curve, they're attacking the 80 of the 80/20 rule... the stuff that people are most likely to use today.
To do this they're mailing-listing themselves into a frenzy and hyper-collaborating themselves into a set of standards. One for events. One for vcards. One for reviews. They're then attempting to gain adoption from publishing platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Reger.com and others. Of course, I'm more than interested in supporting their work... it's good stuff. They're building mashups and generally encouraging integration with the formats without the zealotry of most format wars.
Reger.com is focusing on the 20 of the 80/20 rule... the long tail. If you look out across the globe you find millions and millions of small groups that are very passionate about their data. Runners care about distance vs. time. Candlestick makers in middle Iowa care about wax thickness vs. wick length. Wine enthusiasts care about spice palette vs. sweetness. Dumpster divers care about dumpster location vs. quality of trash.
You get the picture.
In each of their worlds the data is everything... they're truly passionate about it... even though it is largely irrelevant to, well, most everybody else in the world. Given this irrelevance, there's no way that any geek is going to create a microformat called, say, Underwater Basket Weaving 1.0.
You can't service these groups with a top-down approach.
These people are locked out of Web 2.0. Uncool, because these people are us... almost every geek at the Web 2.0 conference has a hobby of some sort that would benefit from a custom microformat. I guarantee it.
You need a grassroots, people-powered approach.
Reger.com gives people a way to create their own microformat with simple drag and drop tools. Web 1.0 stuff. Browsers and forms. Choose the fields that are relevant to your hobby, business (key performance indicators) or life. Track it with extended blog entries. Get charts and graphs.
While users are using the Web 1.0 side of the technology, publishing their data to the web, we're automatically making it all Web 2.0-compatible. We're publishing via Structured Blogging, which I hurriedly demoed for you at the conference. We're creating a custom namespace for your log type and appending it to RSS 2.0 so that your data can be consumed via feeds. We're fairly agnostic when it comes to how to publish that data. We want to be open and transparent so that users can use us as their content-creation-and-storage platform but then mashup with darn near anything out there.
Technologically, we're allowing users to self-organize their own formats in just the same way that Tantek, Marc Canter,
Peter Caputa and others are organizing the big formats.
You start to see a market for log types develop... a microformat meritocracy. With a hundred Running Log types, each slightly different, which one wins? Well, the one with the most users technically wins, but all serve a specific purpose to those who created them. More on that here:
http://www.joereger.com/entry-logid7-eventid4548.logOnce you have enough users there are social effects. Imagine being able to say "show me runners in my area who run more than 10 miles in less than 1hr20min." You can do it today with Reger.com, but we don't have enough users to make the query worthwhile :( The key here is that people connect based on their data. It's the foundation of Match.com. But it applies to many different data sets. Camel farmers connect based on the gender vs. hump height metric. You can't predict that stuff... you just need to give them the tools and let 'em rip.
How does all of this relate to Ning?
Conceptually, the goal of giving users the power to do what they want is the same. Both Ning and Reger.com provide a framework and base set of services.
Ning seems more developer-oriented. You have to know some PHP to get a new app up. This grants Ning users more flexibility to create dynamic apps.
Reger.com is more consumer-oriented. Grandmas should be able to drag-and-drop fields together for their knitting circles (thread thickness vs. knot quality).
Ning allows app developers to frame things in whatever flow or context they choose. Lots of power there.
Reger.com frames everything in a blogging/entry-based metaphor. There aren't flows. You customize the form that you use to enter data and use it. Lots of grandma-lovin' simplicity there.
How could Reger.com and Ning work together?
It's a tough question because neither of us knows what our excellent users will create using our tools. We have to look at a base level of framework and toolset.
Reger.com allows users to define a microformat and publish data using it. Ning has a set of API-like services. Maybe Ning users should have an API that allows them to access Reger.com-created data... a function like getRegercomData(apiEndpoint, namespace) which pulls back a table of data which they could then access. We'd make that data available via XML-RPC... in fact, we already should.
I can see some social tagging integration. Links from tags on Ning to tags on Reger.com. Possibly app-type tagging. A running app in Ning should have some relation to a running log in Reger.com
Start with a simple entry-based data collection metaphor (Reger.com) and add dynamic mashups that require custom code/processing (Ning).
We have a weblogGroups API out there that allows group blogging across platforms. It's entry-based but may provide a mechanism for Ning to integrate into the blog world. Again, another pre-built API service that you can offer your developer users. More info here:
http://www.joereger.com/entry.log?eventid=3287And maybe you've just completely obsoleted me with Ning. I tend to think that we just have different takes on a similar problem and can co-exist happily. Developer world vs. consumer world. App logic vs. data structure. That said, if I do have to get obsoleted in one fell swoop, I'd like it to be by somebody huge like you!
Let's keep in touch. Don't hesitate to throw out ways that we can play together.
Best,
Joe Reger
P.S. Posting to the blog so others can join the discussion... let me know if you object to anything being published.