Online social applications are all the rage these days, and why shouldn’t they be? They allow you to easily interact with others in an established environment that is built to make it easy for you to observe, learn, and participate in the festivities of the application. While the term “social application” may go over your head, the chances are that you interact with one on a regular basis. Have you ever heard of Flickr or del.icio.us? Yep - believe it or not, they’re perfect examples of what a social application is. Instead of always participating in prebuilt social applications, you can actually create you own variations with Ning.

This is the type of service that awakens the wannabe developer inside all of us. Even if you don’t have a background in development, Ning makes it simple for you to get started with the basics of creating a social app. The environment is built on open source principles, and you can easily view the source code of a running application in order to see what makes it tick. If you like what you see, you can clone the application and change some of the basic functions yourself. Although, to really customize the application, you will need to have some coding skills. If you do, you’ll be able to make that service walk and talk in no time.

[tags]open source,ning,social applications,development[/tags]