Back when I was at the php|works conference, i hooked up for dinner with Amy Hoy, who I had met on the #rubyonrails IRC channel. My other blog uses Ruby on Rails as the underlying technology. Anyhow, at the time she mentioned there was a supersecret project she had been working on that she couldn't talk about.

Yesterday, I read about Ning, a site that lets you build what they call "community and social software" applications really easily. It looks like they host everything for you, and profide an API (PHP only for now) for you to write your own stuff. Very interesting concept, and I signed up for a beta developer account if only to screw around with it and see what's going on.

When I saw that Amy's employer was helping them out, I put one and one together and figured out that this was the project Amy had mentioned. Congrats to Amy on being involved in something that is very cool (and sure to spawn imitators).

I also chuckled when I saw that they claim you could create your own dating site. C'mon guys, that's sort of half-true. The site I work on is sitting at 300K+ lines of code. Maybe that could be ruthlessly cut down to half via refactoring and rewriting, but that is still a lot of code to maintain. Simple dating site? Sure. Money-making dating site? Can't see it happening the way Ning is currently setup. Not to say that it couldn't change because, after all, it's still in beta.

Given that Ning is free (and premium stuff is coming that you'll obviously have to pay for) it might be tough to hack together something that you could make money off of. Hrm...sounds like an interesting programming challenge...