Adam Trachtenberg has a new lengthy post today on his blog detailing some of his experiences with Ning, the "playground" for building social applications.

I wanted to blog about it immediately; however, I really didn’t have anything interesting to say. Not that it’s stopped me before, but still. As a rule, I feel that in order to really understand something, you need to get your hands dirty using it. And in this case, I couldn’t just explore the example sites, I actually had to figure out how to build an application on the ning platform.

Fortunately, I know PHP 5 and so does ning.

He dives right in, cloning an app, making changes, updating data - and comes across a few problems along the way. He does make note of one key to the whole setup of ning that needs to be kept in mind - no matter what you're working up or what it does, it's nothing without being useful to someone else. The shared data store helps this, but there are still some socal-level issues surrounding it all as well...