The Ning Playground provides excellent, free opportunities for those looking to design, develop, or run new open social applications and web services. Its features include:

• Rapid development tools for developers at all levels—ranging from point-and-click RAD to deep PHP
• The ability to clone and remix existing applications in a few minutes
• A horizontally scaling hosting environment with an innovative object database
• Greatly expanded application potential with open data sharing by default
• Creative Commons licensing of all content

This session covers:

• Simple and advanced uses of the Ning Playground
• How to clone and remix an existing application in 30 seconds flat
• How Ning can enhance and support your external applications
• A look into the system architecture
• The future of Ning—components, tools, APIs, and languages