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.

Ning has also brought partners TokBox and Box.net on stage as well, to talk about how they have used the developer platform to integrate their products into Ning.

Chief Product Officer Diego Doval also talked about some of the future plans of Ning, including analytics for Ning apps, as well as launching a payment service so that developers can sell their applications to users.

Ning has also launched the Ning Appathon contest, to encourage developers to build on the newly launched Ning Developer platform. The best original application will win $5,000. Prizes for second and third place can be found on the Appathon site.

Juding the Appathon competition are Marc Andreessen, Chris Anderson and Robert Scoble. The competiton ends on November 12, at 10pm PST.

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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).

Ning will be taking a hefty chunk of the revenue from each gift: after PayPal’s processing fees, half will go to Ning, and the other half will go to the network creator who sold the gift. To help spur interest in the new feature, Ning is giving everyone on a Ning network 100 credits, which is enough to buy one gift (each gift normally costs 75 credits which translates to $1.50).

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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.

Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect offer some of this functionality, but again, that’s not actually your social network, it’s Google or Facebook’s social layer laid on top of your site. As such, neither of those are very customizable, at all. Stribe is completely customizable if you know what you’re doing (or have a developer who does). Maybe you don’t want the bar at the bottom of the site — you can move it. Maybe you don’t want it to be the default black — you can change it. But if you just want the defaults, it’s as easy as installing one bit of JavaScript code onto your site to get it working.

People who register to be a member of your site by way of Stribe also become members of the larger Stribe community. This means that if you have a friend who is a member of another Stribe-powered network, you can still chat with them even when you’re on different sites.

Stribe will run on the “freemium” model, offering much of their service for free, but charging a fee to those customers who are of a certain size (according to site traffic). That will range from $10 to $50 a month to use Stribe to create a social network for your site.

CEO Kamel Zeroual and CTO Gael Delalleau presented at the conference today.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire

MS: No integration with any social network there now? Was that intentional?

KZ: The point is that you just need to control and see what is going on, on YOUR website.

DC: 37Signals says that sometimes products do too much, you should do less. With many product, you can do too many things, and it becomes difficult to figure out what to use it for.

KZ: The low-hanging fruit is the community, but we’re trying to reach out to different markets.

C: Are you saying, if I’m Walgreens, this will turn it into a social network? This is different from Twitter, you are just at a site and you want to interact.

KZ: That’s exactly the point, man.

RS: Enterprises already have tools like this thought. What makes this different?

KZ: There are a lot of sites that don’t want to use someone else to become a social network.

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Connected communities matter: Introducing Stribe Stribe.

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At launch Ning Apps has around 90 applications, which add features like video chat, collaborative workspaces, video streaming, and marketplaces to sell goods. The platform is based on OpenSocial, but unlike the applications you’ll find on most other social networks, Ning Apps allow Network Creators to deploy their apps to all of their users at once, though users can choose to hide an app after it has been deployed on a social network. Obviously this is a big opportunity for the apps on the platform — if a major network were to install one of them, they could instantly gain hundreds of thousands of users.

The launch has been a long time coming. We hear from a third party developer on the platform that Ning was targeting a June launch, but pushed the launch to mid-August (and again til now) due to speed issues and frequent requests that Ning tweak the placement of these applications. Ning initially planned to feature the apps on a social network’s homepage — now they’ll be appearing in dedicated tabs within the Ning network.

Earlier this summer Ning raised another $15 million at a whopping $750 million valuation that raised more than a few eyebrows, though that may have been an interesting bit of VC marketing strategy. To date Ning has raised nearly $120 million.

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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.

Lightspeed doesn’t have an investment in a big name social networking startup right now. In fact, their entire Internet portfolio looks a little sleepy and dated. Competitors like Greylock can show investments in Facebook and LinkedIn, two of the hottest pre-IPO startups in Silicon Valley (as well as Pandora and SGN, both of which are getting lots of press attention and fast user growth).

Lightspeed needs to get itself back in the game. And Ning was willing to take the money. A match made in heaven.

Do they expect to see a big return on the investment? Almost certainly not. But they also haven’t put their money at extreme risk. They likely have a liquidation preference that lets them get their $15 million out of the company before others can take part of the pie. So effectively they just bougtht themselves a bunch of marketing with their limited partners’ money.

Of course, the LPs don’t really mind, since they look at returns on the fund, not individual investments. And it may work out well for them. When Greylock invested $25 million in Facebook in 2006 at then-absurd valuation many of the same criticisms were leveled at them, too. But they had a stake in the hottest startup around at the time, and increased their profile in Silicon Valley. Likewise, Microsoft’s investment in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation, was done not in the hope of making money on the investment, but to lock up a search marketing deal.

So at the end of the day Ning gets some much needed additional capital in exchange for a tiny amount of equity, and Lightspeed gets its name associated with the Ning and Marc Andreessen brands. And while they won’t expect to make much of a return on that investment, they will almost certainly get that money back, at least. Everybody wins.

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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. Back in April 2008, Ning had a half-billion dollar valuation, and now it’s supposedly $750 million. That is getting close to the inflated level Bebo was able to sell itself for, which we now know was too high. And Bebo still has more people using its product. (Even in the U.S., it had 8.7 million unique visitors in June).

Ning has been getting its act together, though. Back in December, it expelled adult networks from Ning because they aren’t advertiser-friendly. And that worked out well for them.

More recently, Ning has been working hard to make its social networks compatible with OpenSocial apps. That effort is going much slower than expected. A public launch was delayed last month because of performance issues with the Ning Apps platform, says one developer who is part of the program.

Maybe the new cash will help speed things along.

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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.

GROU.PS’s networks are attractive to users because it 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, etc).

GROU.PS also recently added ActivityRank Pipelines, 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. And the social network is launching a subscription model that will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees charges).

But while the social network is growing, it is still having trouble gaining users in the U.S against the leader in the DIY space, Ning, which hit one million social networks recently. GROU.PS’ is mostly popular in Japan and Brazil.

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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.

Along with Enrique, Collective clients including comedian Eddie Izzard, and actors John Leguizamo and Taylor Momsen will be deploying their own social networks on the platform. And some clients, including The All American Rejects, Staind, and the Plain White T’s have already launched their own Ning networks as their homepages.

I spoke with The Collective partner Aaron Ray, who says that while the company’s artists will continue to maintain presences on other networks where appropriate, Ning has offered a greater degree of access to support personnel than other social networks have – clearly the site is going out of its way to foster its relationship with celebrities. But Ning SVP of business operations Jason Rosenthal says that the company is only interested in working with celebrities that will use their Ning networks to truly connect with fans, not just as vanilla corporate celeb properties.

Rosenthal also says that while many celebrities maintain presences across multiple sites, they tend to use Ning as their central hub, with their other profiles serving as satellite ’spokes’ linking back to their social networks. This isn’t surprising given the increased level of control a celebrity has over their Ning network, than say, a Facebook page. But celebrities won’t be dropping the other services any time soon – a Ning network may offer a richer experience, but casual fans are more likely to subscribe to a celebrity’s Twitter feed or Facebook page than they are to join an entirely new social network.

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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 likely going to be a very enticing platform for developers, too. Unlike social networks like MySpace, when a Ning network creator chooses to deploy an application, they have the option of deploying it to all of their users at once. And with some networks reaching more than 500,000 members, that translates into a huge jump in users. The applications are based on the OpenSocial standard, with some modifications to make them suitable for network-wide deployments. Still, even these changes are pretty minor – Ning says that developers have been porting their applications from other social networks in just two to three days.

Access to applications is beginning to roll out to a small number of Network Creators tomorrow, and will be available to everyone by the end of the month. At launch, all of the applications will be free to install (though some of the apps that involve money, like Cartfly, will take a revshare at the time of transaction), but Ning may well decide to deploy premium applications in the future.

Before now Network Creators have had access to some added functionality through third party applications. But Ning didn’t support these, and some of them were eventually removed from the site entirely. CEO Gina Bianchini says that Network Creators installing applications through Ning Apps can have ‘absolute confidence’ that the applications will work as advertised.

Aside from the launch of Ning Apps, things seem to be going quite well for Ning. The site recently saw the creation of its 1 millionth network (of which 200,000 are active), and is seeing 85,000 to 100,000 new users per day across all of its networks.

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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.

Recently the site has been adding a number of new features that help its network creators spruce up their networks, including a persistent chat feature similar to Facebook Chat. The site also recently revamped its homepage at Ning.com to make it easier for users to manage their activity on multiple social networks and to discover new ones. Network Creators can also access a new directory of OpenSocial applications which run the gamut from games and Ecards to enhanced messaging services.

Because many of its users (particularly network creators) tend to be quite passionate about the sites they’ve built, Ning hasn’t been without its share of controversy, but its continued growth seems to indicate that most users are satisfied.

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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.

Currently in other DIY social networks, like Ning and KickApps, you can give members administrative roles within a network but the decision is done manually by the lead admin and isn’t based on a ranking system. The GROU.PS feature is a useful way to create an incentive for members to create more content for a network, but it is more ideal for a large network with a good amount of content, like this medical GROU.PS network which has 10,000 members. Smaller networks just wouldn’t make use this feature.

GROU.PS’s networks are attractive to users because it 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, etc).

Currently the entire GROU.PS network has 800,000 active users, according to founder Emre Sokullu, which is an increase from the 200,000 active users it had a year ago. Venture backed, GROU.PS raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from Golden Horn Ventures in July 2008. But it seems that the social network is having trouble gaining users in the U.S against the leader in the DIY space, Ning, which is growing at a rapid pace. GROU.PS’ users is most popular in Japan and Brazil.

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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. (As a side note, the reason I am on a video screen in some of these clips is because I joined the event remotely).

To watch the video highlights, just click through the playlist below. For those interested in watching more, you can watch the entire three hours of the event here.

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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 (Quantcast reports that Meebo’s entire network sees more like 12 million uniques), but it’s clear that Ning Chat is rapidly gaining traction.

Aside from its growth in chat, Ning has also been posting some impressive stats recently, growing to 4.8 million uniques in January (a 368% growth year over year) despite the fact that the site recently banned porn networks, which some believed were responsible for a significant amount of Ning’s traffic.

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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.

An event on cloud computing wouldn’t be the same without Amazon, which is becoming the computing infrastructure of more and more startups through its various Amazon Web Services (winner of this year’s Crunchies Award in the enterprise category). And Rackspace, through its Mosso subsidiary, is diving headfirst into the business as well. But we also wanted to hear from consumer-facing companies such as Facebook and Ning that are creating their own cloud platforms. What happens when all of these various cloud platforms meet in sky? And how does the similarity in their back-ends result in similar applications for users, whether they be consumers or enterprise users? Do enterprise apps need to become more social, or is that simply a frivolous pursuit?

These questions and more will be put to everyone on the roundtable, which will be preceded by five cloud computing enterprise product demos which will be evaluated by a panel of judges TechCrunch50-style. We got so many good candidates we decided to expand the demo session and move the event up a half hour earlier.

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.

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

Date: Friday, February 27, 2:30 – 6:30 pm

Location: Microsoft Mountain View Conference Center
1065 La Avenida St
Building 1
Galileo Auditorium
Mountain View, CA 94043

(more info here).

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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.

Ning gave adult networks until January 5th to pack up their bags and leave. That gives us the rest of the month to see how the network of networks fared without them. And it actually fared quite well, picking up almost 1 million unique visitors in the United States (from 3.94 million in December to 4.79 million in January). That pickup is almost enough to pass Bebo, which attracted 4.97 million Americans in January and barely managed to halt a downslide that surely didn’t make AOL happy.

What’s not clear is whether there’s been much dispute over what constitutes adult content. As far as we can tell – and as CEO Gina Bianchini outlined prior to the evictions – Ning hasn’t prohibited nudity entirely. Nudist social networks are still listed in its directory, for example, although all of them appear to be private networks. If you’ve run a Ning network with borderline content that has been either kicked out or allowed to stay, please let us know in the comments.

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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. Each virtual magazine can have members who can comment and upload their own photos and videos.

Yourmagz will offer “freemium” based services, allowing anyone to use the technology’s core benefits for free. The founder says the premium service will be “low-cost” while declining to specify just how much he will charge for it. Yourmagz seems more likely to draw an independent, smaller publication. While it’s doubtful that a large magazine like Forbes would switch it’s content to Yourmagz, but it might be a useful side application.

Yourmagz.com is similar to an existing business. Scribd had a successful year in 2008, which could mean that there is a receptive audience for content sharing services like Yourmagz. You can also get a similar magazine-like experience for free with services such as Issuu.

But there are definite challenges in forming such a widespread and open platform like Yourmagz.com. Recently, Ning found itself in a sticky situation with the creation of adult sites. With Yourmagz’s tagline “Freedom to publish,” it doesn’t sound like the platform will be restrictive. Also, users may not want pay for access to the platform when they could use free services offered by Scribd, Issue, and Ning.

You can check out Yourmagz’s example of an embedded magazine or take a look at the screen shots below:

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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.

Also, even though Facebook is more than 2/3 the size of MySpace in the U.S. today, some key engagement metrics show more activity per user at MySpace. MySpace has almost two times the total time spent (17.5 billion minutes v. 9.3 billion minutes). MySpace generated 40 billion page views in December to Facebook’s 18 billion.

More data for other social networks is in the chart. Ning, starting from a smaller base, leads in overall growth rate, at 388% for the year and 14.1% monthly. Classmates is also growing quickly in the U.S. and had 16.6 million monthly unique visitors in December.

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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?”

Google.

Ning uses Google for advertising, and Google doesn’t like adult content. That puts Ning on a bit of a slippery slope when it comes to defining what is and isn’t adult content. But presumably they’ve now drawn that line, and those 1% of networks that are on the wrong side of it have been notified. So pack your content, and get out.

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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.

Examples of adult content, says Bianchini, include Pornography or images of sexual acts, Nudity intended to sexually arouse the viewer, Graphic photos or videos and Fetishes.

Ah but wait. Examples of sites that are outside of the ban include Networks for heterosexual, gay, lesbian or transgender individuals, Nudist networks, Networks for educational, medical, or clinical purposes that contain nudity, Breast Feeding networks, Art containing some nudity, Travel networks that include content on nude beaches and Networks promoting safe sex.

Ok, so nudist networks and pictures of lactating breasts are fine (as long as it isn’t a fetish). But basic nudity for erotic purposes isn’t. I guess I understand where the line is, but Google’s definition is much more subjective and general (Pornography, adult, or mature content). Is a transgender social network mature content? seems like it is to me.

And how does violence fit in to all of this? Is there any amount of human carnage that would qualify as adult content?

Good luck with this, Ning. Perhaps that’s why Google turned YouTube PG.

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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.

YouTube isn’t the only social media site cracking down on the sexy stuff. Build-your-own social network Ning will no longer allow “adult social networks” starting in January, even if they are legal. The advertisers Ning (and YouTube) are trying to lure, just don’t like being associated with that type of content. Ning CEO Gina Bianchini explains in a blog post:

Adult social networks don’t pull their own weight. Specifically, they require other social networks to work harder because they don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs. Plus, 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. We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that’s where this is heading.

She also notes that legal adult social networks create more work for Ning by receiving “a disproportionate number of DMCA take down notices” and they also attract more illegal adult social networks. I guess, it’s like the broken car windows theory—small infractions lay the groundwork for bigger problems. Perhaps YouTube is thinking along the same lines.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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