Earlier this year, I received an email from Marc Andreessen inquiring about some PHP security consulting. Being well aware of Marc's role in Internet history, I was curious to learn about his new project and eager to help out.

Others were also curious, but not in a very supportive way. Mark Fletcher had this to say about Marc's company:

Who knows what they do, but whatever it is, they're doing it wrong.

Well, now you can judge for yourself - Ning lives!

Ning is an attempt to lower the barrier of entry for creating social applications. The idea is that there are plenty of great ideas out there for these things, but the barrier of entry prevents many of them from coming to fruition. It's also a hassle for users of social applications to have to create a different account for every one.

One interesting thing about Ning (aside from the fact that PHP plays such a major role) is that it is open source in nature - you can clone any Ning application (some exist specifically for this purpose) and "mix" it to suit your needs. Ning describes this as "clone, mix, and run."

It will be interesting to see what sort of applications this yields.

On a different note, I was also happy to hear that my book went to print yesterday. The two biggest reasons why I've had no time these past few months are finally finished. Now I can sleep. :-)