Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, Opsware and Ning and the former CTO of AOL, is adding a new notch in his belt: he has joined the board of directors of Facebook, two sources close to the company confirmed to us (speculation about Andreessen possibly joining the Facebook board started last month on the Boomtown blog). The company should be announcing it shortly, perhaps this week.

Andreessen will join Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer on Facebook’s board.

At first glance, the move isn’t a fit for competitive reasons - Andreesseen is involved full time at Ning, a platform for the creation of social networks and arguably a direct competitor to Facebook. But Andreessen is known to be a mentor to Zuckerberg, who calls on him often for personal advice. It isn’t surprising that Zuckerberg would ask Andreessen to have a formal involvement with the company.

Andreessen will reportedly remain with Ning full time and retain his Chairman title.

The board position Andreessen has taken is one of the two vacant common stock seats Zuckerberg controls in addition to his own seat. One of those seats has never been filled. The other was previously held by former Facebook President Sean Parker, who left the company in late 2005.

Andreessen joins Facebook at a crucial time in its growth. Competitors MySpace and (increasingly) Google are gunning for control of the social graph, which may be the engine that drives the next big growth wave in advertising. Several early Facebook executives have left this year as the company has evolved, and new executives have taken their places. Zuckerberg needs a trusted guy in his corner to help him avoid missteps like the launch of Beacon last year, which has led to serious privacy concerns. Andreessen has fought similar battles in the past and won, and his counsel is clearly a competitive advantage.

Photo credit: Mathieu Thouvenin

Update: This has now been officially announced.

• Sphere It
• 

Digg competitor Mixx just launched an extension to its groups feature that founder Chris McGill describes as “Ning for social media”.

Users can now set up Mixx community sites on their own subdomains (see ours here). Administrators have the power to brand them visually, post editorial content, and even make some revenue off advertisements. Others can join as members and begin submitting items as they would regularly on Mixx. All submissions (stories, images, and videos) can be made just to a particular community, or to the Mixx site as a whole as well.

This release is more akin to Reddit’s hosted “create a Reddit” service than it is to Reddit’s new open source offering since Mixx communities are hosted and can only be rebranded to a limited extent (with custom logos and color schemes).

Just as the standard Mixx experience is divided into verticals like Entertainment, Science and Sports, communities can deploy their own tabs for niche topics. The TechCrunch community, for example, has been seeded with tabs for “Obtaining Funding”, “Creating the Dream Team”, and “Revenue Models”. To keep each of these categories alive - and therefore your community members engaged - admins can set tags that will automatically import relevant items from the main Mixx sharing stream (”google”, “arrington”, “techcrunch”, “twitter”, “yahoo” have been set as tags in our case).

Communities also come equipped with a message board and a “member lounge” that provides community overview information such as activity stats, member lists, and awards for top submitters.

Social media fanatics will enjoy this new ability to carve out their own alcoves in Mixx. I’d really like to see Mixx take the next step and allow for a completely rebranded experience so that web publishers the net over can incorporate user contributed content seamlessly into their sites. This would entail proper domain masking and thorough CSS and HTML customization, as you’d find on KickApps. Then Mixx could really claim to compete with the likes of Ning and the other social networking platforms.

• Sphere It
• 

Adam Penenberg of Fast Company got lots of well-deserved grief for his cover article about Ning last month, the one that focused on the Andreessen and Bianchini duo’s “viral expansion loops”.

The overly simple idea behind those loops is this: members join a service and then invite their friends. Rinse and repeat, and you’ve got exponential growth rates.

Things aren’t quite so simple and straightforward (factors like stickiness come into play), but there is a good deal of truth to the idea that users beget users, especially when a mass of them holds a certain value (the so-called “network effect”). So it would come as no surprise if one of Ning’s competitors decided to claim even stronger viral expansion loops.

Grouply, a broad social network divided into groups that are built on top of those found at Yahoo, is making such a claim. Assuming the concepts of groups and networks are tantamount, Grouply claims to have passed Ning, last reported to have 230,000+ networks, with its 300,000+ groups (see chart below). And Grouply is owing its success to the symbiotic (or parasitic?) relationship it has established with Yahoo.

When Grouply started off, it was mainly a tool for members of multiple Yahoo groups to keep track of their activities. It then evolved into a more distinct social networking platform by expanding the ways in which members could interact onsite, thereby bringing it into closer competition with Ning. But while networks on Ning are built from scratch, groups on Grouply must be identified from the start with groups on Yahoo.

This is a double-edged sword to growth. On the one hand, non-Yahoo users will fail to find Grouply as an appealing place to start their niche networks. But Yahoo groups users will find it exceedingly appealing to do so, and it’s that special appeal that boosts Grouply’s adoption rate.

During the Grouply setup process, members of a particular Yahoo group can be sent invites to the new Grouply group (a practice that has led many to accuse Grouply of spamming). Regardless of how enthusiastically Grouply users actually push their new creations, they benefit from the previously formed communities on Yahoo because they can invite members over to the new and improved party. Such well-targeted invitations are why Grouply can assert that it possesses superior viral expansion loops.

So great, Grouply claims to have one-uped Ning. But there’s still a concern over the actual quality of these networks and groups. How many people belong to them on average? How active are their users? How long do those users actually stick around? And what are they up to? No one really knows, outside of the companies themselves. What I’d like to see are companies divulging great levels of detail regarding their usage statistics. That way we can truly gauge the relative success of these social platforms, the proliferation of which continues every day.

• Sphere It
• 

Seattle based wiki startup Wetpaint has always been ahead of the pack in terms of design and usability. Now, a couple of years after launch, they’re starting to see real usage traction as well.

The product isn’t just about wikis - they also have social features (profiles, friends, etc.), and added things like forums and, more recently, photo uploads, over time. In many ways they are more like Ning, which allows users to create social networks easily, than other pure wiki sites like Wikia.

The company has raised just $14.8 million in capital. Compare that to $104 million for Ning. But in terms of user adoption, the two are much more similar.

Comscore says Ning had 3.8 million monthly unique visitors in March, compared to 3 million for Wetpaint. Wetpaint says they now have 900,000 wiki sites and are adding 2,000 more per day - Ning has just 263,000 social networks. Wetpaint says they also have 3 million pages of content.

Ning’s traffic as reported by Comscore is still way above Wetpaint’s - 90 million monthly page views v. 18 million. But Wetpaint also allows users to put wikis under their own domain names, for free (Ning also allows this but charges a monthly fee). Most of Wetpaint’s biggest sites are under custom domains, they say, so a lot of their traffic isn’t reported by Comscore. They are probably still a lot smaller than Ning in terms of page views, but they are growing rapidly nonetheless.

Wetpaint has 70 sponsored sites now - wikis created by or for partners to promote specific brands or events. One example: HP has a community wiki on Wetpaint. Another: Showtime hosts wikis for all of their shows, like this one for The Tudors.

Given Ning’s success in raising capital and growing the number of networks on their platform, it isn’t surprising to see Wetpaint position themselves against them. Part of what makes Wetpaint different from other social networking sites, says CEO Ben Elowitz, is that people gather there under niche communities and do more than just share photos or videos - they create content around the things they are passionate about.

Wetpaint is also working on some other projects - including an embeddable wiki product called Project Balco, which we wrote about earlier this year - but won’t disclose many details yet.

• Sphere It
• 

Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nonetheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.

Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SAI decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.

The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.

Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)

Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SAI gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.

But what are you gonna do? At least SAI acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.

• Sphere It
• 

There’s seemingly no end to the number of collaboration tools out there: blogs, wikis, forums, bookmarking, photos, chat. Chances are you already use one or more of them already to keep in touch with friends or coworkers. The only problem is that all these platforms don’t work together very well.

Grou.ps is trying to fix that integration problem. They’ve created a service that lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one Grou.ps domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups - each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, more listed in the image below). Each module adds a new tab to your navigation bar where users can access the module’s features. Here’s an example group for Chemists worldwide.

Grou.ps isn’t the only startup trying to solve the integration problem. Ning and Wetpaint have integrated forums and various forms of media into their community products. Google and Zoho also have have very compelling collaboration suites. A single sign-on can get you chat, email, presentations, documents, wikis, and many other tools.

However, Grou.ps benefits from being simple like Ning and Wetpaint, yet focused on productivity like Google and Zoho. They present a simple free solution for moderated online collaboration.

• Sphere It
• 

Social network platform Ning joined Slide in the Half Billion Dollar Club by raising $60 million (after banker fees) on a $500 million pre-money valuation. Like Slide, Ning used influential investment bank Allen & Co. to represent them in the deal.

Venturebeat broke the story based on a perusal of SEC filings, and we’ve confirmed it with Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen. “We have raised about $60M net at $500M pre from a set of institutional investors (who we’re not naming, since they said they’d prefer privacy, which we’d like to respect),” he said in an email.

Andreessen on how they’ll use the money: “We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.”

The timing of this is great for Ning - they’re also the subject of a beautifully uncritical fluff piece in this month’s Fast Company that talks about “viral expansion loops.”

Ning has now raised over $100 million.

• Sphere It
• 

Ning certainly continues to rock and roll, at least according to data released by the company and reported by Comscore. The company, which allows users to easily create social networks, now has over 200,000 social networks on the platform and is adding another 1,000 or so per day. And Comscore-reported traffic is spiking up nicely: 3.1 million unique visitors/month, generating 71 million page views (February 2008). Ning, in short, looks like it might be a real business. Meanwhile, Ning competitor Flux, which is backed by Viacom, seems to have fallen off a cliff (we’re checking with Comscore on that data - see our earlier post on Flux growth here, including the update). Update: Comscore notes that the apparently severe decline in the Flux graph linked to above is overstated because of earlier inflation, so it is not really falling off a cliff. It never rose high enough to fall in the first place.

More Bells, More Whistles

Tonight at 10 pm California time Ning will launch a redesign (screencast here) that includes a updates to the photos, videos, groups, members, profile, forum and blog features (see here and here)

Ning is certainly feature rich, and users are flocking to it (a little porn never hurts, either). What I’d really like to know is how revenue growth is coming along. The company generates fees from advertising and users who want premium features. They’ve raised more than $44 million to date.

• Sphere It
• 

Dow Jones VentureSource put out some data on Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. earlier this week that I’ve put together into these charts. The first one above shows how much money has been invested in Web 2.0 startups so far this decade. In 2007, venture capital poured into Web 2.0 companies at a record pace—$1.34 billion. That was up 88 percent from the $716 million invested in 2006.

But did Web 2.0 deals peak last year? Take out the $300 million raised by Facebook, and the amount invested was up only 46 percent, a marked slowdown from the 132 percent dollar growth the year before. (The amounts charted above, starting with 2001, are $68 million, $29 million, $79 million, $232 million, $716 million, and $1.343 billion)

The growth in the number of deals is also slowing. Last year, there were 178 Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. That was up only 25 percent, after doubling every year for the previous four years. And in Silicon Valley last year, the number of deals actually dropped from 74 to 69.

In 2007, the median deal size was $5 million, up 22 percent. And the median pre-money valuation was $10 million, up 66 percent (from $6 million in 2006). Both deal size and valuation for Web 2.0 companies remained below the average VC deal across all industries ($7.6 million and $16 million, respectively)

Here is a list of some of the biggest venture financings of 2007, including ones for Facebook, Ning, Zillow, Veoh, MyStrands, and Hi5. Slide’s $50 million isn’t included because that was in 2008. Hey, maybe things haven’t peaked after all.

• Sphere It
• 

New social network traffic figures released by Compete show that Fubar, billed as the “first online bar and happy hour” is the fastest growing social network, having increased its traffic by 3,272,217% over the 12 months to the end of February 2008, placing the network at 14th on the list of top 20 social networking sites (chart as shown).

Year on year MySpace hasn’t grown at all, managing to lose 1% of traffic compared to Facebook with 77% growth.

The other big gainers year on year include Ning at 4803% (sneaking in to 20th place) and Twitter with 4368%.

• Sphere It
•