The Social

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. Traffic had recovered in February, CEO Gina Bianchini told CNET News.

Bianchini added that much of Ning's growth comes from networks that aren't ultra-niche, but are focused on something that has a rabid and vocal following. Case in point: thetwilightsaga.com, an official fan site for the vampire-themed book series that converted to a Ning network shortly after the first book was turned into a hit movie. In two months, 94,000 people joined, she said.

"I believe that no one is doing and thinking about graphing interests and passions, and thinking about people as their interests and passions, except us," Bianchini told CNET News.

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 our board," Zuckerberg said in the release issued Monday.

Not surprisingly, the 24-year-old hopes that Andreessen can act as a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi figure. "He has experience that is relevant to Facebook in so many ways: scaling companies that are experiencing extraordinary growth, creating successful technology platforms, and building strong engineering organizations. I know Marc will be a great mentor to me and our leadership team," Zuckerberg said.

Perhaps most interestingly, Facebook's release refers to Ning as "a complementary platform to Facebook." When rumors began to swirl about Zuckerberg wanting Andreessen on his board of directors, some critics suggested that he'd have a conflict of interest as co-founder and chairman of a potential rival. But Ning is more a Web 2.0 spin on the discussion forums of old (say, 1998), allowing members to create micro-niche communities centered around discourse. Facebook, for many, is the 21st-century edition of an address book: highly effective at what it does, but centered on maintaining connections rather than letting interest groups flourish. Facebook's own "Groups" feature, for example, is very stripped-down compared with Ning.

And it doesn't look like Andreessen sees Facebook as the competition either. "Facebook is one of the most innovative companies on the Web and it's an honor to join the board," he said in the statement. "I'm looking forward to helping the team as Facebook continues to grow."

I'm In Like With You, a social-network-turned-gaming-site that caught a brief flurry of press for its eye-popping design when it launched, has just closed a $1.5 million round of venture funding led by Spark Capital. It's the first funding the site has received since its angel round last year.

In addition to Spark, the round includes current investors Baseline Ventures, Betaworks, and veteran investor Ron Conway, as well as an investment from Netscape and Ning founder Marc Andreessen.

The funding round was widely rumored as the site--having failed to live up to the hype it first generated as a flirty social network--started rebranding itself as a hub for social games but would clearly need more funding (or a corporate parent) to do so. Founder Charles Forman, a fixture on the New York digital-media social circuit known for handing out giant business cards and owning a seemingly endless supply of pink T-shirts, was introduced to Spark's Bijan Sabet through other local young entrepreneurs late last year.

In a phone interview, Sabet praised Forman's creative vision and willingness to completely change the site's direction when he saw a new opportunity in the growing niche of social gaming. I'm In Like With You is keeping its trippy, cartoonish design but the focus is now on multiuser casual games like Blockles, Gemmers, Draw My Thing, and an impending game that involves hamsters.

To complement the funding round, Forman has started expanding his team, including the hire of Skype veteran Poojitha Preena as chief operating officer as well as several game developers. Forman told CNET News.com that the entirety of the $1.5 million would be used to throw a large-scale party, but we think that one's a joke.

Facebook has asked tech veteran Marc Andreessen to join its board of directors, according to Kara Swisher at All Things D. The deal isn't finalized, apparently, but Andreessen has "verbally agreed" to the commitment.

The Netscape founder is currently at the helm of his own social-networking site, Ning, which lets Web users create their own branded community sites without technical expertise. Because of its focus on niche communities rather than mass communication, it's not a direct Facebook competitor.

Facebook, meanwhile, has been padding its ranks with seasoned industry leaders as a means of competing with the Valley's biggest names. Google sales executive Sheryl Sandberg was brought on recently as chief operating officer, and this week it was announced that Google communications czar Elliot Schrage would be making the jump to Facebook as well.

Current Facebook board members include Accel Partners' Jim Breyer and PayPal co-founder and Founders Fund investor Peter Thiel.

SAN FRANCISCO--"It turns out that the Internet has worked pretty well," industry mainstay Marc Andreessen told an audience at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday morning.

Andreessen's keynote interview with Federated Media chief John Battelle was somewhat of a history lesson into the distant past of the Web (you know, 15 years ago) followed by the requisite speculation about an uncertain future.

Marc Andreessen looks back and ahead at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET Networks)

"It was a very confusing time," Andreessen said of the Net's early days. In the early days of Mosaic, the browser created by Andreessen that eventually evolved into Netscape and then Mozilla and then Firefox, "the conventional wisdom in the business world and in large parts of the press was that interactive television was going to be the future...the Internet, really, at the time, and the Web and Mosaic were really sort of renegade academic research projects."

But Andreessen's current project, Ning, couldn't be less renegade. The slick dot-com, which taps into the social-media craze by letting members build their own social networks without requiring technical expertise, has been fueled not only by Andreessen's Valley cred but also by a sky-high valuation and a recent $60 million funding round that the exec famously said was for an economic "nuclear winter."

"I have no idea what's really going to happen," Andreessen said when Battelle asked him about the "nuclear" comment. "There's this huge irony for our industry...we got blamed for a lot of the last crash. We are the most remote uncorrelated part to this crash that's happening because tech may have lots of issues but we tend to not have a lot of debt and this is all about debt and credit.

Regardless, Andreesen seems to think his own company's well-prepared. He proudly touted some Ning statistics: more than 250,000 individual social networks have been created, 75 percent of which are active. Page views are going up 10 percent week over week; a million new members are joining every month; and 1,500 networks are created every day.

But Ning, like Battelle's Federated Media, could take a big advertising hit in a recession. Once again, Andreessen reminded Battelle and the audience that things tend to be unpredictable. Back in the early days, he said, "everybody told us there was no way to make money on the Internet."

Battelle made sure he touched upon a particularly touchy subject for Andreessen: Microsoft. Gates & Co. famously dealt a fatal blow to Andreessen's Netscape Navigator browser in 1995 when it released Internet Explorer. Anyone hoping for nastiness would've been disappointed, though, as Andreessen's take on Microsoft was quite friendly. "It's hard to even conceive what this industry would be like if Microsoft hadn't standardized the operating system," he said.

"Our view was, we adapt," Andreessen said when asked if he'd freaked out over the debut of Explorer. "The browser turned into Mozilla, which turned into Firefox, which has been a huge success."

Andreessen also addressed Microsoft's ongoing desire to acquire Yahoo. "If the deal goes through I think it will actually be a really good deal. I think they'll get a lot out of it," he said.

But he added that he'd be a bit sad for Yahoo. "It's always a little bit sad, the prospect of an entrepreneurial company, especially one that's had that kind of success over the years, not being independent. But over time these things are part of the natural evolution."

The media business hasn't figured out that direction yet, in his view. "Most of the major media companies are still largely unprepared for the shift, which is ironic considering how long the stuff has been around. If you look at newspapers right now they're just in absolute freefall from a business standpoint."

He kept talking about evolution. But somewhat paradoxically, he repeatedly emphasized that nobody can really tell where it's going. "We're 15 years into it, and yet things are still developing, and a lot of things are still unknown."