Bubble? Ning! Bubble? Ning! Bubble? Ning! Bubble? Ning!

How do we know it's a bubble? because there are 60 other companies with the same business model.

See this list of "White label social networking" sites

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/02/12/l...

Thanks for the great post title, Robert. Made me laugh.

Jeremiah: 60 companies tells me that it is a big market with even bigger potential

you should be worried (or curious) when $44M gets invested into a space that nobody cares about

What could they possibly spend $44 million on???

As if it isn't hard enough to find good technical help already, now they're going to suck up every halfway decent geek and his dog.

I just started a Ning site for a project and it works well. A social network of 24 people. Awesome.

At least the bandwidth will be there, one would hope.

Maybe I'm just stupid but I just don't get it. Then again I didn't get Twitter either when it was first released to the public.
I want to know 2 things, will it better my chances with the opposite sex, and will it further my career opportunities.

The greater the number of social networking sites (assuming they don't cross communicate any better than they do now) the less useful all of them will be.

If Ning, or some consortium of existing social network sites could make all such things cross-communicate, then you could pick the one or more that you want to most frequently interact with (let's say your old school for example) and still have a "presence" in the others.

Ning makes this possible, of course the possibility isn't realized until Myspace, Facebook and all the others become Ning driven (no I don't expect that to happen). But Ning DOES have the potential to make further development of specialized social networks unnecessary. I think that potential may be behind the optimistic valuation (having a very famous founder doesn't hurt either).