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.
For those of you not closely following the drama between social network platform Ning and a popular widget provider called WidgetLaboratory, you can read the background here. On Friday Ning unceremoniously shut down their access to Ning, making all those widgets vanish.
WidgetLaboratory cried foul, saying they’d done nothing wrong, that the ban was “completely without any notice,” and that “it would appear that [Ning] decided to elminate WidgetLaboratory for anti-competitive purposes alone.” Ning was silent in response, citing a “longstanding policy against publicly discussing third party widgets and applications as well as the details of Terms of Service violations.”
Ning remains silent on the reasons for banning WidgetLaboratory, but the whole story is coming out anyway. WidgeLaboratory has posted a number of emails back and forth between the two companies in support of its case (in the event the emails are taken down, we’ve grabbed a copy here). But the emails show just the opposite - that Ning was concerned over the fact that WL was gathering credentials from users and otherwise creating havoc on Ning networks. It was clear that Ning wasn’t happy with WL, was working with them to resolve the problems, and made it clear that if the problems were not resolved WL would be removed from the platform.
In an email to WL on August 2 (more than three weeks ago), CEO Gina Bianchini wrote “Our only goal is to have you build your products in such a way that doesn’t slow down the networks running your products or takedown the Ning Platform with what you’re doing. Both of those would result in us needing to shutdown WidgetLaboratory products and that’s has never been our first choice of options. Hopefully, you know this after 8 months of working with us.”
In another email to WL on August 7, Bianchini wrote “If we have evidence other than our conversation last night that you are asking for username, password, and pin of other Network Creators on WidgetLaboratory, we will be put in the unfortunate situation of shutting down your network and widgets. We don’t want to do this. In fact, we’d like very much to work more closely together but we can only do so if everything you guys are doing is within the Terms of Service.”
The emails taken as a whole show a pattern of emotional rants by WL, followed by reasoned responses by Ning. Frankly, if I was Ning I would have banned then a long time ago based on the harvesting of user credentials alone.
Based on their own evidence WidgetLaboratory flat out lied in their initial communications around the ban to gather sympathy, and then used the situation to get further attention from the community. These guys are idiots.
Yesterday we reported on Ning’s termination of its most popular premium widget developer, WidgetLaboratory. Although apparently justified, Ning removed all WidgetLaboratory widgets from its platform without warning to the community, and in doing so broke many of the social networks that had been created by its members. The decision was met with a backlash from the Ning community, as many members had spent hundreds of hours and dollars perfecting their homespun social networks.
Ning says that WidgetLaboratory has broken the platform’s Terms of Service, but hasn’t to specified publicly what violation it has committed (though we have heard that WidgetLaboratory had been warned multiple times). This may be the case, but Ning neglected to warn any of its members that the change was coming, leaving many of its top networks in shambles.
Today, WidgetLaboratory has decided to hit back. The company has written a blog post stating that it is open sourcing all of its widgets, many of which were formerly only available for a monthly fee, to allow users to get their networks back up and running. Users will be free to add, modify, or improve on each widget as they wish. The post also announces WidgetLaboratory’s free migration tool, which will allow Ning users to pull content from their social networks should they wish to move elsewhere.
The migration data will be available for users to use as they wish, but WidgetLaboratory plans to help users find open source alternatives to Ning where they will be able to set up shop (WidgetLaboratory won’t have anything to do with actually hosting or managing the networks).
I spoke with Spencer Forman, CEO of WidgetLaboratory. Forman says that Ning has only specified one violation in its terms of service - network degradation - and that Ning is simply being anti-competitive. He explained that they have had similar network quality complaints from Ning in the past, but that oftentimes it was actually a fault of Ning’s servers or setup, and not WidgetLaboratory’s (he says he will be releasing a full record of email and phone exchanges to support his claims). Finally, he says that Ning was uncomfortable with WidgetLaboratory’s success (the widget maker may have been collecting as much revenue as Ning itself), and that any other explanation is a smoke screen.
In any case, the bold move to open source the widgets puts Ning in a bind. If the site bans the widgets, users will skim through the code to find anything that could be in violation. If Ning lets them stay, then obviously the network issues can’t have been the real motivation behind WidgetLaboratory’s removal in the first place.
Update:
Earlier today Ning posted a response to some of the issues. Ning will be implementing a number of features to replicate the widgets in the next few weeks, and will try to take measures to a prevent any future lack of communication. Here’s an excerpt of how they will deal with such ToS violations in the future:
…Namely, if we have had to warn a third party developer, we want to provide some general way of letting you know about it before we remove them from the Ning Platform… Now, I can’t guarantee that we’ll always be able to do this. There are times when a third party developer’s actions require immediate attention and removal. We will always put the needs of the Ning Platform as a whole ahead of functionality on any individual network.
There’s already a pretty general way to notify users that you’re stripping a portion of their site: Email (blog posts work too). Ning needs to defend its users and its network stability, but it should have done something to warn its users beforehand.
Ning, the build-your-own social network platform, has removed all widgets created by popular premium developer WidgetLaboratory. The news has come without warning and is being met with outrage by a number of users who have spent hundreds of dollars on the widgets to build up their social networks. WidgetLaboratory sells its widgets for around $30 a month, and has managed to become the most popular widget creator on Ning’s platform.
WidgetLaboratory has posted a notice to its site explaining that it has received no explanation from Ning, and speculates that the shutdown is a result of anti-competitive behavior rather than a breach of the ToS - it’s possible that Ning saw that the company was making a sizable amount of revnue, and was worried that it might make a grab at its users. The site has also posted a form asking users how much they’ve spent on their widgets so they can be properly compensated (apparently through a lawsuit).
Update: We’ve been digging into the story and it appears there’s another side to this. We’re hearing that WidgetLaboratory may have been displaying a pattern of questionable behavior and that they were given “ample warning” and a chance to correct their actions. Ning isn’t commenting on the situation, so the full story may not ever be fully understood.
Here’s an excerpt of WL’s statement (the emphasis is mine):
As of this morning, August 22, 2008, we learned from our customers that Ning had unilaterally removed Widgetlaboratory.com and all of its products. We have received no formal notice or explanation at this time. We have not violated any Terms of Service, nor have we violated any published “guidelines” from Ning.
This action by Ning was completely without any notice, was without any merit, and in our opinion was done for the sole purpose of eliminating a company that had started to provide a useful and valuable service to all of you. We have a full and complete documentation of our relationship with Ning from the very first moment that we contacted them in November of 2007 and met with them subsequently to get their blessing for creating our company and products. The facts and details contained therein will substantiate our claims regarding Ning’s actions.
We have achieved a level of market penetration into the Ning community that has made WidgetLaboratory a somewhat “essential” resource for add-ons and widgets. Based upon the personal phone calls and correspondence from the entire Ning team, including their entire Executive staff, it would appear that they decided to elminate WidgetLaboratory for anti-competitive purposes alone. This is truly ironic to us, given the fact that our products have demonstrably INCREASED the popularity of Ning and caused more customers of Ning to purchase their Premium Services. This was truly a win-win-win relationship between Ning, WidgetLaboratory, and all of you.
Ning has responded by explaining that WidgetLaboratory has violated the social network’s Terms of Service, but says it won’t be providing any more additional details to the public.
This morning we removed WidgetLaboratory, a third party application developer, from the Ning Platform for violating Ning’s Terms of Service. WidgetLaboratory provided independently developed applications that could be added to a social network on the Ning Platform by a Network Creator. While we try to be as transparent as possible, it’s our long standing policy not to comment on specific cases where we remove networks or third party developers from the Ning Platform so we will not be providing any additional details publicly.
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.
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.
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.
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