Tonight at a Ning’s developer event in Palo Alto, newly appointed COO Jason Rosenthal announced that Ning has reached 37 million registered users, as well as 1.6 million Ning networks created. The company also says that it grows another million users every couple weeks. Out of the 1.6 million Ning networks, 20% of the active networks are running at least one Ning application — reaching more then 9 million people.

According to Ning, on average, each network installs more then two Ning applications. Since the Ning application directory launched, there have been over 100 applications created and submitted.

Today Ning, the platform that lets users build their own social networks, is launching a new feature called Ning Virtual Gifts, bringing a built-in virtual goods store to the site’s 1.6 million networks. Virtual gifts have become increasingly popular over the last few years, largely thanks to their popularity on Facebook, and I’m sure plenty of Ning’s Network Creators are eager to cash in on the trend.

Ning is letting Network Creators choose from a library of pre-made virtual gifts, but they’re also free to create their own. This means that the site’s Brooklyn Art Project network can offer gifts that are miniature versions of handdrawn artwork. It also means that the New Kids On The Block network can sell gifts of… the bandmembers’ faces (I do realize that I’m not the target demographic with those, and Britney Spears has seen quite a bit of success selling her face as a gift on Facebook).

The idea of adding a social network to any site is a compelling one. Currently, most sites do this by creating their own networks using service like Facebook Groups and Ning. But those obviously aren’t actually your own site, they are other sites set up under your site’s name. Stribe’s goal is to move the network back onto your site.

The service, opening to the public today at Techcrunch50, provides a free and easy way to place a social networking layer over any site. This layer exists on your site in the form of a bar at the bottom of the page. This is not unlike the Meebo chat bar that you may have seen on this site and others recently. But Meebo was really only about chat (and sharing), Stribe wants this bar to be a full-fledged social network on your site, including members, comments, and yes, chat.

Ning, the social network platform that lets users build their own social networks, has launched its application platform Ning Apps to the public. The platform allows Network Creators to customize the features on their networks by adding apps that have been created by third party developers, which include the likes of Ticketmaster, WordPress, Hulu and plenty more. The platform made its debut back in May, but has remained in Beta since then. Today it will be available for all network creators to use. You can browse the list of available apps here.

A lot of readers were incredulous over last week’s news that Ning raised another $15 million in venture capital from Lightspeed Venture Partners at a $750 million valuation. That comes despite the fact that Ning traffic appears to be flatlining, and revenue to date is likely very small.

A typical comment to that post: “What an ASTOUNDING way to waste money.” Others pointed out that venture capitalists typically invest hoping to at least have a chance at a 10x return – and in Ning’s case, it seems unlikely that the company will be worth the necessary $7.5 billion any time soon. So, why’d they invest?

Marketing.

Do-it-yourself social network Ning has added another $15 million to its coffers from LightSpeed Venture Partners, the company has confirmed to us. This brings the total capital raised to $119 million. Its other investors include Allen & Co., Legg Mason, chairman and co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Reid Hoffman.

Ning offers a counterpoint to the uniformity of Facebook, allowing anyone to create their own social network customized to their particular interest or social group. Earlier this year, Ning passed one million social networks created (it is now up to 1.3 million), but the key is how many of those are active and how many people they attract. In the U.S., unique visitors actually declined 10 percent from May, 2009 to June, 2009, according to comScore. Ning had 5.1 million visitors in the U.S. in June (its worldwide audience is about three times as large).

The company attributes the decline to “some downtime in June as we expand and optimize our infrastructure to support the growth that we are expecting in the next 12 months.” Ning says it is adding 4,000 new Ning Networks every day and one million registered users every 15 days.

One month hardly makes a trend, but Ning’s fragmented approach to social networks has yet to catch on in the way that Facebook’s monolithic strategy has in terms of activity or pure audience reach across the network

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration, has raised $1 million in an extended Series A round of funding from Golden Horn Ventures. The company previously raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from Golden Horn in 2008.

GROU.PS currently has 1 million registered members and 40,000 social networks on the platform. The DIY social network is growing fast; the platform has grown from 200,000 users to 1 million members within a year.

Over the last few months celebrities have become something of a currency on the social web as services vie to attract big-name stars (and gather the resulting media coverage and new users in the process). Twitter has garnered the most attention for its roster, which includes celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah. Facebook too has been making strides in this area, especially since releasing its redesigned ‘Pages’ that allow celebrities and brands to broadcast their updates to fans.

Another contender in the celebrity hunt is social network platform Ning, which is already home to a number of social networks dedicated to celebrities, politicians, and musicians. Today, the company has announced that it has forged a partnership with The Collective, a management company whose clients include Enrique Iglesias, to create custom networks for a number of The Collective’s biggest clients.

Ning’s social network-building platform is getting a huge boost today, with the private beta launch of Ning Apps, a new suite of applications and features that Network Creators will be able to deploy across their networks with only a few clicks. The news has been a long time coming – network administrators have long been asking for features that could enhance their networks. But because of the nature of Ning, which houses hundreds of thousands of unique social networks, Network Creators were often requesting totally different things. Now they’ll be able to make everyone (or nearly everyone) happy.

At launch, Ning Apps is offering 90 new features to Network creators, built by 52 different developers that encompass a wide variety of web services. Network creators will now be able to integrate live video chat through TokBox, condunct contests with Wildfire, and create Wikis. Even better: network admins will be able to easily integrate monetization options, selling merchandise through Cartfly and tickets through Amiando and other ticketing apps

Ning is going to be reaching a big milestone this week, when it sees its one millionth social network created on its self-serve platform. Ning, which had its initial beta launch in 2005 and ‘full’ launch in 2007, makes it easy for people to create niche social networks focused on the topics they care about.

Ning continues to grow steadily despite the fact that it banned ‘adult’ social networks late last year (some had suggested that the site relied on these adult networks to drive a significant amount of traffic, which isn’t the case). Ning now reports 22 million registered users overall, 700,000 of whom have created their own networks. Of the 1 million networks created, 200,000 remain active, across which 2.5 million new pieces of content (including comments and photos, and other media) are added per day.

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration is launching a new tool, ActivityRank Pipelines. The feature is a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings.

The moderators are able to activate the “ActivityRank” feature within their admin interface, which can rank users by how much content is submitted onto the network and by the type of content. For example, a blog focused network could give more points to the moderated blog entries than the contributed photos or links. The administrator then create roles for the group, such as Designer or Blog Moderator. A “Pipeline” can be set up, where the admin can define at what ranking a member is rewarded with what role.

On Friday, during our cloud computing event, Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?, Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary noted, “The cloud is the new dotcom.” He was one of the judges for the demo startups, and for good or for bad, he might be right. Cloud computing as a term is broad enough to encompass most internet startups and already is in danger of being latched onto as the next catch-all category. Yet there is also obviously something there. Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and even Facebook all want to become the cloud platform of choice for startups and developers to build their Web apps on.

And we are already seeing some impressive cloud-based apps that would have been much more difficult to build without these platforms. During the demos, for instance, Veodia showed an app for recording video in the cloud straight from a laptop’s camera—no uploading required. FathomDB is putting a relational database in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2), and Diomede Storage is offering its own cloud service with a twist: online storage where you can monitor the power consumption of each file and act accordingly.

Below are four video highlights from the roundtable that followed the demos. In the first video, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff argues that “we are on the threshold of fundamentally a new paradigm of computing.” He defines cloud computing both as as software-as-a-service and as platform-as-a-service (and judging by how many cloud platforms were represented at the event, it seems like everyone wants to be the latter).

In the second video, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains why Amazon is in the cloud computing business in the first place, and says that overall for cloud computing in general: “This is still Day One.” We talked a lot about how enterprise apps are starting to look more and more like consumer Web apps, partly because they are both being built on similar back-end cloud architectures. But in the third video, Google’s Vic Gundotra takes exception to the idea that enterprise apps mimicking consumer apps is anything new.

And in the final video, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini talks about the importance of video in the cloud and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit talks about how consumers don’t care where all the data and applications are stored, but that applications on different cloud platforms nevertheless have to be able to seamlessly interact with each other. (Videos after the jump).

Tonight Ning will introduce new chat functionality, giving Ning network administrators the oft-requested ability to integrate a rich chat environment similar to the one launched on Facebook last April. Ning’s new chat system is Flash-based, presenting users with a persistent chat bar along the bottom of their screens as they browse through a Ning network. Users have the option of chatting through an interface at the bottom of their screen, or can ‘pop-out’ their chats into their own windows. While the interface will remain consistent across each network, users won’t be able to chat with members outside of the Ning network they’re currently browsing.

Ning originally introduced a more basic chat feature last summer, but that version uses either dedicated chat pages or sidebar iFrames, which means they aren’t always visible as users navigate through a network. But even the basic version has proven to be very successful – Ning’s chat traffic has skyrocketed, as seen in the Compete graph below pitting Ning’s IM domain against Meebo’s homepage. To be fair, the graph probably doesn’t take into account Meebo’s traffic that occurs offsite (like Meebo’s Community Chat product or its chat widgets), but it’s clear that Ning Chat is rapidly gaining traction.

Our roundtable on cloud computing is coming up next week. (Get tickets here via Eventbrite: $75 each based on availability). In addition to the previously announced speakers, I am happy to announce a few more very special participants: Amazon’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, and Jon Engates, CTO of Rackspace. Below is the complete list of Roundtable Participants

Roundtable Discussion
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail

Roundtable Moderators:
Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT

The roundtable will be preceded by five cloud computing enterprise product demos which will be evaluated by a panel of judges TechCrunch50-style.

There will also be a networking party afterward where more companies will be giving product demos. We couldn’t do this without our sponsors Microsoft and Ribbit. To find out about how to become a sponsor or get a demo table please email Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde. (More after the jump).

At the beginning of last December, Ning reversed course on its anything-legal-goes policy by declaring a prohibition on adult social networks. The reason? Porn wasn’t paying the bills; instead of attracting advertisers, it was scaring them away. Legal adult content was also begetting illegal content, which drew the ire of both authorities and lawyers with DMCA notices in hand.

Given the report released by CPM Advisors at the beginning of 2008, which suggested that Ning relied on adult content for much of its traffic, one might expect Ning to take a hit after shooing the smut out the door. But according to comScore traffic from January, that hasn’t been the case at all.

Canadian start-up Yourmagz.com launched the closed beta version of its SaaS content distribution platform today. You can sign up to view the site.

The platform – which can be described as a hybrid between social network platform Ning and web document sharing service Scribd – specializes in distributing publishers’ content across various websites, social networks, and mobile devices. So basically, a user creates a website (much like one can do on Ning), uploads print or video content and then can distribute a “virtual magazine” to Facebook and other social networks, mobile phones and websites with the click of a button. While it’s suitable for any online publisher, creator Andrew Echenberg hopes to draw a more diverse crowd of universities, business and non-profits.

Year end Comscore numbers for the U.S. audience are out. The first thing we checked? How the major social networks are doing.

Facebook, which became the largest worldwide social network in mid 2008, is still playing catch up to MySpace in the U.S. They have 54.5 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore, compared to nearly 76 million for MySpace. But Facebook’s growth rate in the U.S. averaged 3.8% per month over the last twelve months. MySpace’s U.S. growth rate is 0.8% per month. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, but unless things change a lot, Facebook will overtake MySpace to become the largest social network in the U.S. in…2010.

At current growth rates Facebook will overtake MySpace in January 2010, a year from now. That is the month Facebook will reach 86 million U.S. users, compared to MySpace’s 84 million in January. Will this prediction be correct? Probably not, but it’s the best guess given today’s data.

It may actually take longer. Facebook’s growth rate had been increasing as the year wore on but dipped in December. As they get closer to MySpace it may become ever harder to catch up.

The eviction of Ning’s adult sites is in full swing. The actual shut down of the sites doesn’t happen until January 5 (extended from January 1), but the sites that are affected have now received an email with instructions on how to get their content off Ning.

Ning CEO Gina Bianchini says only about 1% of the 675,000 networks are being asked to leave for having adult content. She also points out that Ning attracts 2,500 – 3,000 new networks daily.

The reason Ning is shutting down adult sites despite the fact that cofounder Marc Andreessen thinks Ning should “let people fundamentally do what they want?”

On Tuesday Ning changed its long standing policy on allowing networks that show pornography and adult material. “Adult social networks don’t pull their own weight,” Ning CEO Gina Bianchini said, and “our ad partners aren’t big fans of the adult networks.”

As far as I can tell, at this time Ning has only one advertising partner – Google. Google won’t put adsense on sites that contain “Pornography, adult, or mature content,” so Ning was at risk of being banned by Google despite the fact that only a very small portion of the networks on Ning are adult oriented.

The problem is that it isn’t clear exactly what networks are being banned. In the blog post, Bianchini said that “adult social networks” are being discontinued. In response to inquiries by some network operators, Ning clarified their policy today in a new blog post. “As it relates to the Ning Platform, adult networks include, but aren’t limited to pornography and depictions of sexual acts,” Bianchini says.

YouTube is trying to clean up its act by cracking down on sexually explicit videos that are just short of porn and spam videos with misleading titles and descriptions. (Porn has always been grounds for removal). On its most visited pages, YouTube will now apply a “stricter standard for mature content” and demote sexually explicit or graphic videos from its “most viewed,” “top favorited,” and other popular pages. Also, thumbnails will now be algorithmically selected.

These new standards are not just about YouTube trying to class itself up. The more it polices itself, the less likely that Congress or the FCC will try to police it in the future. (For the FCC, its jurisdiction would probably be limited to mobile devices that access the Web over cellular networks).

But the bigger consideration may simply be to get rid of what amount to spam videos taking over YouTube. If you are looking for puppy videos, you are probably not looking for a video with a lady in lingerie and bunny ears that is actually an ad for a porn site. (Or maybe you are, but in that case you should be searching for “lady bunny”). This is a real example, but I’m not going to link to it.