The Social

Social-network creator Ning is letting those networks get even more customized: it's unveiled Ning Apps, the company's full plunge into the developer platform craze. It goes into private beta on Thursday and will launch in full later in May.

This announcement is a long time coming, as Ning launched a limited application gallery in October--and that was still nearly a year after it was among the original launch partners for the OpenSocial developer application consortium.

There are a couple of things that make Ning Apps different from the social platforms found on the likes of Facebook or MySpace. While the earlier, limited array of apps offered on Ning was strictly for members to embed on their profiles, the formal Ning Apps product is geared toward the creators and administrators of Ning social networks. They can add an application--from a cash donation widget for a nonprofit network, to a ticket sales app for a band's fan page, to a live video stream of what-have-you--and it'll mesh right into the social network.

"A Ning network creator selects one of these apps, that functions basically like a full-fledged feature on the social network, and by choosing to install an app the app has a presence on the front page of the social network," Jason Rosenthal, Ning's senior vice president of business operations, told CNET News. "It gets a dedicated tab within a social network, and perhaps most interestingly, by default the app is installed on every (member's) profile page of that social network."

Ning, co-founded by Silicon Valley notable Marc Andreessen, doesn't yet make any extra revenue off Ning Apps, even though the possibility is there for the social network to take a cut of financial transactions or ad revenue. "It does open an interesting new monetization opportunity for us," Rosenthal said, "but not today."

The company announced last month that 1 million social networks had been created on its platform.

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.

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 a recession.

Advertisers don't like it, Bianchini said. "Our ad partners aren't big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue," she explained. "We don't want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that's where this is heading."

And if legal adult-content networks are allowed, the illegal ones invariably weasel their way in, Bianchini said, and that means more work for a small team. The number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices is also higher for adult networks: "Compared to our other social networks on the Ning Platform, the additional work created by adult networks alleged to have violated the copyrights of others is enough for us to discontinue adult networks in favor of investing time and energy in growing the Ning Platform from here," Bianchini wrote.

Ning isn't the only site to be cracking the whip on porn. YouTube, owned by Google, said on Tuesday that it's "tightening the standard for what is considered 'sexually suggestive.'"

Bianchini co-founded Ning with Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and famously raised a $60 million round of funding in anticipation of a "nuclear winter." Guess that was a good move.

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.)

A Ning profile with the OpenSocial 'BuddyPoke' app added.

(Credit: Ning)

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 directory on Ning will be selective, so it won't be a developer free-for-all.

A few OpenSocial apps had gone live on Ning in beta over the past year, including one from social music service Last.fm (which is owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive).

You still can't embed OpenSocial apps on Ning networks, just profiles--but that will change, CEO Gina Bianchini said to CNET News, when future versions of OpenSocial (the current one is 0.7) are developed. "In its first incarnation, it looks and feels a lot like what you'd be doing on a MySpace profile or on a Facebook profile in terms of adding apps," she explained, "but what's unique about us is that we have half a million social networks and they'll want an app for their network as well."

From the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Google engineer Kevin Marks praised the incorporation of Ning into OpenSocial, which he helped build. "The nice thing about Ning is that we're going from about 100 social networks to about 500,000 social networks," Marks said to CNET News.

The question still remains, though as to whether Ning would opt to support Facebook applications--still not compatible with OpenSocial--the way social network Friendster has.

"We'd love to support Facebook apps," said Bianchini, who co-founded Ning with veteran entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. "Right now, Facebook hasn't neccessarily set it up in a really clear, programmatic way...(Facebook) has talked about it, then came back from it, and it's a little bit in limbo right now in terms of really what and how they would want other social networks to support Facebook apps."

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."

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 claims 900,000 wikis have been created, far more than the 263,000 that Ning counts (though who knows how many of those are legitimate and/or active). While Ning's way ahead in traffic, a few months ago Wetpaint released a set of features to ramp up social-networking activity on the site, with friends lists, news feeds, member profiles, and Yelp-style "compliments" now in the mix.

There are also 70 "sponsored" Wetpaint wikis, like the fan wikis created by cable network Showtime for each of its programs.

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."

The launch of Google's OpenSocial platform earlier this month might have been more PR than anything, as many of the third-party partners implementing the new developer standard won't be releasing anything for months.

Instead, OpenSocial-related announcements have been rolling out slowly: one of the latest is that social music site Last.fm has created OpenSocial widgets designed for use on Ning, a site that allows any person or business to create a specialized social network. (According to Ning, more than 123,000 networks have been created so far.)

A Last.fm application on a Ning profile

(Credit: Ning)

Ning network creators and members can now install the Last.fm music application into Ning pages. It can display the top artists they've listened to, songs they've played recently, a custom list, or a player to hear recommended music.

Last.fm was acquired by CBS Interactive earlier this year. Up next, the music site will be tweaking its OpenSocial application for other OpenSocial participants, like Bebo, MySpace, and Friendster.