Bonafide genius Marc Andreesen, co-creator of the first Netscape browser, recently released his social networking application builder, Ning.com. For newbies to RSS development, this just may be a leg up for creating web applications - complete with maps and databases - with automatically generated RSS feeds. And you don't even have to be an experienced programmer.

While you are limited to building your applications by cloning the 7 existing applications, these are great starting points regardless of your programming skills. All of the code is written in PHP. And the database interface has been simplified so that those of you not familiar with web database programming can still give a ning.com application a try.

For those of you more experienced, some clever cross-site scripting (XSS) plus AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) applied to the PHP code may actually produce some incredibly advanced web applications. What's more, you get your own subdomain on ning.com.

You can move the code to your own domain, but without the Ning.com database interface, the code will never work. However, you can set up a second application on your domain that harnesses your Ning.com app (either by capturing the RSS/XML feed, or the HTML output of one of the PHP scripts). The possibilities for web applications with RSS feeds are quite likely endless.

To become a Ning.com developer, just apply for your free developer's license, wait a few days, accept your license agreement, clone an existing Ning.com app, then start tweaking.

Go grab your free Ning.com developer's license. I've got mine, and I'm already working on a number of new applications, including what might possibly be a visual paradigm for RSS feed consumption. I'll be blogging about Ning.com applications in this blog under the "RSS Development" category. So come back often to check out what I have cooking for custom RSS Feed case studies.

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