Silicon Valley based Ning and Los Angeles based Flux are “networks of networks” that allow communities to build feature rich social networks with a few clicks.

Ning, which launched in 2005, has raised over $44 million in capital and has 130,000 social networks on its platform. Ning was founded by CEO Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen, pictured to the right.

Flux, which launched in September, is a joint venture between Viacom and Social Project (formerly Tagworld). They are pre-launch, but power a number of social networks around Viacom properties (including MTV) and third party sites.

The two companies are on a collision course. Both platforms share users, meaning once someone has signed up for one social network on the platform, joining another one requires just a single click. Ning has built its community from the bottom up, and has benefited from backlash against the big, sometimes impersonal social networks. Flux, the newcomer, carries the weight of Viacom’s hundreds of brands behind it and will soon open up to any third party that wants to join.

But something about Flux doesn’t sit well with Bianchini, who sent us a long analysis of their business model. She goes into detail on Viacom’s history with partners, their tendency towards litigation, and conflicts between Flux’s marketing materials and terms of service. Flux undoubtedly will respond. For now they have no comment.

The analysis, written by Gina Bianchini, is below. I’m staying neutral on this for now until Flux fully launches and they’ve had time to respond to this. But I’ll say this - it is refreshing to see a company be willing to mix it up and say exactly why they think they are the better service. Too often, PR-speak gets in the way of clear communication. That certainly didn’t happen here.

Update: Social Project has asked us to point out that the sections of the “Terms of Service” excerpted in the post below are from the Social Project Terms of Use (for end users) and a third party Privacy Policy (also for end users). The information does not come from Flux’s third-party partner agreement. Third-party partners on Flux retain rights to their data and users. Social Project is an independent company with no controlling investor.

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It turns out the rumors of a Viacom investment and partnership with social network Tagworld were accurate. Viacom invested a reported $40 million in the company for a minority stake (Tagworld was previously funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson) and the two companies began working on new social networking products. Tagworld’s parent company has been renamed Social Project.

Tomorrow morning they are launching the fruit of that partnership - an ambitious new disaggregated social network around Viacom’s MTV, Comedy Central and other brands and associated websites called Flux.

Tagworld/Social Project cofounder Evan Rifkin and Mika Salmi, the president of Global Digital Media for MTV, walked me through the product earlier this afternoon. A screen shot of the unlaunched service is below.

The new service takes technology developed by Tagworld and Viacom’s existing Flux brand and creates distinct social network properties for each of the brands (some are launching now, hundreds are launching throughout the rest of the year). Like Ning, users who sign up for any network (say, Comedy Central’s) can join other networks (like MTV’s) with a single click.

As users add additional communities to their profile, they bring their content and friends with them. Flux is simultaneously a single brand as well as hundreds of distinct, branded social networks.

Not Just About Viacom Brands

Flux is opening up to companies and brands outside of the Viacom family. Twenty non-Viacom sites have been quietly testing the service for some time. See, for example, Vinyl Pulse and 50Cent. Both have integrated social networks built by Tagworld. They’re not yet co-branded under the Flux service, but will be now that the service is officially launching. New third party sites will soon be able to apply to join the Flux network; in the future there an API and other tools will become available that will let anyone join.

As I said above, comparisons will inevitably be drawn to Ning and white label social networks (see our overview of various white label services here and here).

But Flux really is a network of networks. While it is most like Ning, the walls between the Flux networks are very porous - uses drag content (photos, videos, etc.) between sites, perhaps grabbing a video from the 50Cent site and presenting it on their profile at the MTV site. While each community has distinct branding, the individual users see groupings of brands that they enjoy under a single profile.

What Happens To Taworld?

The existing Tagworld site remains as is, although the company is turning off new registrations for now and focusing entirely on Flux.

TagWorld, the social networking site that launched in late 2005, has been the subject of a lot of speculation lately. Valleywag speculated that the company was in trouble and pointed out that the management page (cache here) had been removed. Others have noted that TagWorld’s Comscore numbers have dropped significantly from earlier in 2006. At the very least, the company has made little headway against MySpace and the others.

But there are other rumors as well. Viacom and NBC are still figuring out their social networking strategies (NBC is doing so publicly), and insiders are saying that Viacom will likely announce an investment and/or partnership deal with TagWorld in the near future. It’s likely that TagWorld’s engine will be the back end to the much anticipated MTV social network. TagWorld won’t comment on the story, other than to say that they remain healthy and will be launching a new version soon.

TagWorld previously raised $7.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, in March 2006.

San Francisco based Piczo is having a media coming-out party today, with announcements on the current state of the service and key statistics. A few weeks ago CEO Jeremy Verba did the same thing in the UK - which we covered on TechCrunch UK.

Piczo is adding 35,000 new member registrations per day, 75% of which are teenagers between 13 and 16 years old. Ten million unique visitors come to Piczo sites monthly, adding up to 2.5 billion page views. While this isn’t much compared to monster competitor MySpace (which serves over 1 billion pages per day), it shows what the power of the network effect can do when applied properly - Piczo hasn’t spent a dime on marketing.

And unlike Myspace, Piczo is focused on safety first. It is virtually impossible to browse user pages on Piczo. There is no search or browse feature. Users must share their page URL with others for it to be found, and there are numerous ways for users, parents and others to report inappropriate behavior. Piczo has full time staff reviewing all complaints and takes swift action to protect its members.

Piczo was founded in early 2004 as a paid service. Based on early user feedback it was relaunched as a free service, and founder Jim Conning sent out 100 emails to Canadian teenagers announcing the new site. That is where Piczo’s marketing efforts began and, until now, ended. The result of those 100 emails has been a massive viral spread of the product.

Piczo brought in a high powered CEO late last year, Jeremy Verba. Verba was previously GM and Vice President of AOL’s Voice Services division, which he grew to over a million subscribers. In addition, he was co-founder and president of E!Online, a joint venture of CNET and E!Entertainment Television, now a part of Comcast. Piczo is well funded after pocketing a total of US$7 million over two rounds of financing from Sierra Ventures and Catamount in 2005 and 2006.

The Social Networking Space

I thought this was a good opportunity to look up Comscore numbers on the largest social networking players and see how things are evolving (these are U.S. numbers only). MySpace is still the king, with over a billion page views per day, 100 million registered users and 56 million unique visitors per month. If anything, their lead is growing over competitors.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be other winners in this space, too. Facebook continues to dominate the college and high school markets, and their recent decision to open themselves up to anyone will almost certainly increase their userbase and page views. Bebo, Tagged, Piczo, Friendster, Tagworld and Tribe all also show very nice growth rates, with little or no marketing spends.

There’s still room to grow internationally as well. Bebo and Piczo both have a strong presence in the UK in particular. Of course, the argument that these companies will be successful in non-English speaking countries v. local competitors isn’t nearly as certain. We expect consolidation to occur in the next 12 months, and the largest independents (Facebook, Bebo, etc.) to be acquired by the big guys (Yahoo, Microsoft and Viacom in particular seem to be actively looking).

Los Angeles based TagWorld, a social network with nearly 2 million members that is funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is launching a Flash widget platform on Friday at TagWorldWidgets.com.

TagWorld Widgets is an open platform and they are inviting developers in to build on top of the thirty or so widgets available now. The developer site is here. The widgets are usable on any website, and TagWorld is heavily promoting the use of the widgets on competing social networks like Myspace.

There are a couple of innovations that make this a more interesting solution than what is already offered by BunchBall and others (BunchBall profile here). Widgets have customizable properties that allow website publishers to personalize them. Things like colors, fonts, speed, etc. can be customized after integration on the website and without going back to the TagWorld site.

I’ve written about TagWorld a number of time since launch - see the posts here.

Tagworld, the next generation Myspace competitor, is showing that there is plenty of room for growth in the crowded teen/young adult home page market (previous TechCrunch posts on Tagworld are here).

First, they’ve closed $7.5 million series A round of financing led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Note: competitor Tagged announced a $7 million financing led by Mayfield in February 2006.

This comes as Tagworld hits an important milestone - 1 million members and counting since their launch on November 11, 2005. while this is still just a drop in the Myspace bucket of 60 odd million members, its still a lot of people using the service after a very short period of time.

Tagworld will be launching a number of new products and partnerships this week as well:

Music Engine

I’ve been asking for Pandora (TechCrunch posts here) to be built into third party music engines for a long time (I’d like to listen to streaming music and occasionally branch off into Pandora discovered similar music at any time.

Tagworld hasn’t partnered with Pandora but they are launching something similar. While listening to music on the Tagworld music player (pop up player or embedded into Tagworld sites), a user can branch off at any time with the click of a button to hear related music - and this includes both big name artists as well as indie’s that are using Tagworld to become noticed.

The engine is powered by user ratings of artists, albums and songs, and individual ratings are weighted according to a number of additional (and proprietary) factors. The result? Listen to the music you like, and branch off to discover new related music at any time.

Music Videos

Tagworld is also launching a new music video product through a partnership with Universal Music Group. Unlike Myspace, which only allows viewing of videos on a Myspace page (and then only in Internet Explorer), Tagworld will allow integration of music videos directly into any Tagworld site, and will work with IE or Firefox.

Initial included artists include 50 Cent, Black Eyed Peas, Gwen Stefani, Kanye West, Nelly, The Killers, Jack Johnson, U2, Fall Out Boy, Snoop Dog, The Bravery and Daddy Yankee.

Classifieds

Tagworld has also released a classifieds area for members. Any member can now build an online store very easily.

Acquisition rumors for Tagworld are already swirling through the valley, although founder Evan Rifkin flatly denies any discussions with acquirors and says that they are focused entirely on building the business now that they’ve raised this round of financing. And while Myspace (and Facebook) continue to dominate the market for teen home pages, the constantly refreshing nature of their customer base (people grow out of Myspace and millions of new teens enter the market every year) means that they must find new ways to “stay cool” and appeal to this fickle market.

Myspace competitor Tagworld will announce a large Series A financing by Draper Fisher Jurvetson sometime today. Tim Draper and Emily Melton will be joining Tagworld’s board of directors.

This comes just two weeks after news of competitor Tagged’s $7 million financing by Mayfield was leaked and reported by Matt Marshall.

My previous posts on Tagworld are here.

Santa Monica-based TagWorld, a MySpace competitor, launched an admirable music product last month. Tomorrow they launch video and an upgraded upload client (the uploader is PC only for now).

As an aside, TagWorld claims half a million member registrations (launch was in November 2005). This is far short of MySpace’s 50ish million, of course, but it is impressive growth.

Video

Tagworld is taking a decentralized approach to video. Users may upload video in just about any format directly to their TagWorld storage (all users are given a gb of storage to use for video, music and any other type of file). Alternatively, videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites can be “bookmarked” directly into the My Videos area, and/or directly into the user’s TagWorld page for streaming to visitors.

I have not seen a solution that offers both uploading and bookmarking functionality, allowing users to choose to upload or just point to another site for video. This seems like an evolutionary step forward to me.

File Uploader

Since TagWorld is also operating a virtual storage service as well by giving users a gb of free storage, they’ve developed a client based uploader tool to handle large files and folders. TagWorld automatically detects if a file is music/audio, video, or another type of file and categorizes it approriately. If a user uploads a folder containing a video, and song and a word document, those files are places in My Music, My Video and My Files, accordingly. Again, I’ve not seen this on any other service. A mac client is in development.

The Uploader is live now, Video goes live tomorrow morning around 9 am.

Over the weekend TagWorld, a young, self-funded startup in Santa Monica that’s all of a month old, launched a music product that is turning heads.

TagWorld is targeting the MySpace crowd - generally people under 25, who all want a blogging/home page presence on the web. Sites like MySpace, FaceBook and Xanga are generating a truly massive number of page views - MySpace and FaceBook each rival Google in page views (although they don’t approach the reach). The reason? These users spend most of their day on these sites, updating their sites and clicking on friends.

TagWorld already had an impressive feature set that includes a GB of storage and great ajax tools for creating a site. And, as the name implies, tagging of everything.

The new music functionality is a full generation ahead of MySpace and others. Bands can upload a GB of music and have a number of DRM options to control distrubution. Users can mix this music into their own media player and can upload their own music (and other files, like photos and movies) as well. They can create customized music playlists, store the music on TagWorld and have access to it anywhere they can get online. Users can also set up playlists that others can listen to when they visit the user’s website. All of this requires nothing but the ability to click on the music and drag the music player modue onto their site. No HTML or other technical skills are needed.

Can TagWorld take on MySpace and become the King of Social Networks 3.0?

Yeah, I think they will. For a number of reasons.

First, the founders, Fred Krueger and Evan Rifkin, have done a great job getting top bands to start using the platform. Check out the TagWorld pages for Death Cab For Cutie, The Shins and The Postal Service.

Second, TagWorld has 160,000+ users after just a month of being live. The “in” crowd is starting to notice.

Third, I think the teenager/student social network doesn’t have the same lock-in that, say, ebay has. TagWorld’s target users are fickle and don’t want to be considered mainstream. They’ll try new things and if the functionality is there, they’ll stay. And this target market is constantly renewing itself as children become teenagers (new customers) and young adults move on to more professional tools (customers leave).

So, in a nutshell, I’m bullish on TagWorld. And some of these features quite frankly appeal to a much larger audience than teenagers and young adults. The market for an online music locker with a portable player is wide open. TagWorld can take this market.

Santa Monica based Tagworld has been quietly beta testing its product for a few months, and officially opened its doors earlier this week. They now have 75,000 members and are growing by thousands per day. The funny thing is that I had never heard of them before last week when I was contacted by Carmen Hughes of ignitepr for a preview.

Tagworld is a huge project. At its core it is a blogging platform, and at first glance it appeared to be a sort of advanced Myspace or Tagged - a blogging platform that would ultimately appeal to teens and college students as its core market. But after meeting the founders and getting a first hand look at the deep features, it’s clear that it is more than just the next teen blogging hangout. There are advanced features that will appeal to a much larger audience.

The site is still rough and a number of features are buggy. But given their early subscriber growth, it appears that they are on to something interesting.

Tagworld was founded by Fred Krueger and Evan Rifkin, two serial entrepreneurs who’ve had a string of successful liquidity events. They’ve self funded Tagworld, which is six months old and has 20 employees.

The site is going to try to own just about every web 2.0 experience of its users - blogging, bookmarking, photos and other media files, file storage, and tagging. They say they are going to have open data in and out, meaning if a user is really attached to say, Flickr, they’ll be able to integrate with those photos seemlessly. And they’ll have RSS and APIs to send data out. But their clear goal, as Fred said when we met, is to replace del.icio.us, flickr and blogger (among other services) for its users.

All features are free to users (other than extended file storage); Tagworld makes its money from integrated advertising.

Blogging

Tagworld has a solid blogging platform that is based on user-included widgets (posts, pictures, tags, friends, media player, maps, etc.). Designing the site is done through an Ajax interfact that allows dragging and dropping for quick organization.

The platform is based on widget objects. There are a bunch of widgets that have already been included (such as those mentioned in the paragraph above), and there is an API for third parties to create their own and share them on Tagworld.

Blogs are easily customized by users, and more advanced users can take full control of the html as well.

Tagworld has an advanced wysiwyg tool for editing blogs, including adding photos (resizing, positioning) and media files.

Social Bookmarking

A social bookmarking feature is included. They do not yet have a bookmarklet but the core functionality is on the site. Tagworld automatically takes a small screen shot of the page as well and includes it with the bookmark metadata. Bookmarks can be tagged, and shared or kept private. They are also building integration tools with other bookmark services such as del.icio.us.

Pictures and other Media

Tagworld has a decent tool for uploading photos. There’s a great flash module for showing off photos on the home page.

Uploading media files is also easy, and there is a media player module to play video and audio files on the home page. Fred and Evan say that they will also have flickr integration into and out of tagworld for users who do not want to switch.

File Storage

They are still ironing out the details on this feature, but Tagworld is allowing a full gig of file storage. These files can be tagged, searched and integrated into the user’s website very easily. Uploaded media files can be played on the home page/blog by integrating it with the player widget.

The first gig is free. They plan to charge “at cost” for additional storage.

Tagging

Everything on Tagworld can be tagged. People, posts, pictures, media files, other files, etc. Combined with search, it’s a very useful way of finding content.

There are other nice touches as well. Search is well integrated with personal and community tags. RSS will be available soon. And they’ve done some interesting things with Ajax, such as a slider control to increase or decrease the search results shown on a page.

Tagworld is not for everyone, but it may be for the mass consumer that is just starting to jump into web 2.0.

I just checked the site. In the time it took me to write this profile, Tagworld added another 1,500 users. In the end, customer acquisition and monetization is all that really matters.