A few months back, a brand new kind of service was introduced to the web - Ning. It was all anyone could talk about for weeks after, and everyone had high hopes for its future. So, why is Michael Arrington wondering about its demise?

What happened to Ning?

It was the perfect service at the perfect time.

The idea of Ning, which launched in October 2005, is brilliant. Let people easily create social applications tailored with difference web services. Allow others to clone those applications and take the code from them directly into whatever they are building instead of building from scratch. Watch everything evolve as better and better stuff gets built, which in turn is used to build even better stuff. Ning leverages the platform by aggregating the applications and selling advertising and premium tools/features.

But the reality of Ning is that it's lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people's attention when they finally do roll out better functionality.

He shares what he sees as the problems with their setup (including the fact that you need to know PHP, or at least HTML to get anything done). Some of the reasons cite that they didn't promote it as well as they could have, and they've restricted it to their ning.com domain - not very practical for developers that want to use the system for their own sites/development/branding...