Ning passes 100,000 social networks
As I've previously discussed, my new company Ning exists to give everyone the ability to create your own social network for anything -- in less than two minutes, for free -- with the ability to customize your network any way you want.
Today we passed 100,000 social networks on Ning.
This chart shows the number of social networks on Ning since we rolled out the current version of our service earlier this year:
(Credit:
Marc Andreessen/Ning)
As you can see, 70,000 networks have been created in the last seven months alone!
What does it mean to have 100,000 social networks?
As you might expect, the 100,000 networks on Ning follow a power law curve for any metric you choose to apply: number of members, say, or number of page views.
Internally we think of the networks on Ning as falling into three buckets:
* Big networks -- the top, say, 200 networks at any point in time that each have a large number of members.
* Long tail networks -- smaller networks with, by definition, more than 1 member but fewer members than the big networks -- could be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of members.
* Throwaway networks -- networks that were created, maybe have a few members, but are not being used.
Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.
Marc Andreessen is the cofounder Netscape Communications Corp. and Ning, a consumer Internet company. 
