ning

Sometime on Thursday, the one millionth site was created on Ning, the build-your-own-social-network company that was co-founded by Silicon Valley baron Marc Andreessen. It launched just over two years ago.

Ning now has 22 million registered users, about 6.1 million of whom are considered active. Out of the million networks, about a fifth are currently active.

While these numbers are still small compared with the likes of Facebook (on whose board Andreessen sits) it's impressive considering Ning lost 20 percent of its page views in December when it chose to shut down networks containing porn and other adult content. … Read more

As if we didn't know it already, the National Bureau of Economic Research has officially confirmed that the economy is in a recession. So heading into the new year, how will technology fare in what is an increasingly uncertain era? CNET News on Tuesday begins the first of a multipart series on how the recession is affecting the industry and its people. Jim Kerstetter kicks off the series with an overview.

Today's stories:

Gawker Media's rolling layoffs continue

Ford acclerates electric-vehicle plans

Yahoo stock rises on new acquisition report

Ning puts the handcuffs on porno networks… Read more

There's no more room for smut and naughty bits on build-your-own social network service Ning, according to a post on the company blog. Ning has announced that it will shut down its "Red Light District" of adult content, and on January 1 will formally ban it.

"We are exploring ways for adult networks that will no longer be available on Ning to export their content in addition to their members," the post by CEO Gina Bianchini read. The reasoning, she explained, is that it's costly and problematic--something you just can't deal with in … Read more

Social-network builder Ning has deployed its support for developer applications for OpenSocial, something that it has been planning to do since Google kick-started the open-source project nearly a year ago. (It is now an independent organization.)

As part of the launch, a directory of 30 applications will be available for Ning members to embed in their profiles, which they use for any of the hundreds of thousands of networks created with Ning. They'll have variable "skins" to adopt the design of the profile around them and blend in, the company has said. Incorporation into the OpenSocial app … Read more

Ringside Networks was a very cool company - one of the best new open-source companies, as I wrote earlier this year. The company had a dream similar to Ning's - to make social networking-type applications an integral part of a wide array of websites and enterprises.

This past month, however, even as Ning neared 500,000 social networks (at least one of which is not used for porn! Go figure!!), Ringside went down for the count.

Why? How could a company flush with some of the best venture money in the business - Matrix Partners - go under even before it really had a chance to sell into a welcoming market? Bob Bickel, Ringside's co-founder, explains:

We were ready for our Series A round of funding, and in late May we received a number of term sheet offers from the very best VC firms. As we were about to finalize our funding, one of the biggest non-evil Internet companies asked if we would have interest in being acquired instead. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact.… Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Ning co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini started off her keynote speech at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference by describing Ning as the social network you've never heard of.

Unlike Facebook, which is more of a beehive with 100 million members buzzing around, Ning allows individuals and groups to create their own social networks.

Bianchini said here Wednesday that Ning is gaining traction, minting a new social network every 30 seconds. That's more than 86,000 per month on top of the nearly 500,000 social networks (65 percent actively used) already on Ning. Among those … Read more

As has been repeatedly rumored, Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen will be taking a seat on Facebook's board of directors. In a press release issued Monday afternoon, the veteran entrepreneur--co-founder of Netscape, former CTO of AOL, and now co-founder of social site Ning--was announced as the board's fourth member. He'll join Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as well as two of the company's early investors, Accel Partners' Jim Breyer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, now of the Founders Fund and Clarium Capital.

"Marc is an industry leader, and we're fortunate to have him join … Read more

Update at 5 a.m. PDT Wed., May 14: Andreessen's analysis of Google Friend Connect has been added.

Marc Andreessen sees a number of companies suffering from the same disease.

"...I think a lot of companies have what I call 'strategitis.' Instead of launching a product, which would apparently make too much sense, they come up with a 'strategy,'" he says. "There's a strong temptation for companies that don't have strong social networking franchises to roll out social networking 'features' instead of products, and in reality, consumers like to have products."

Andreessen is … Read more

Short version: Wetpaint might be one to watch.

Long version: TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. It's Wetpaint, a Seattle-based service we haven't heard a whole lot from lately. The reason, Arrington says, is that it's positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.

The easy-to-create wiki service pulled in 3 million page views in March, according to ComScore numbers, compared with 3.8 million for Ning, the well-funded social-network creator helmed by Marc Andreessen. Wetpaint also … Read more