Great work guys.

Re your question about why people will want their own social networks — the reason is simple: everyone has specific interests around which they connect and communicate with other people. Their family, their school, their church, their coworkers, their friends from high school, their political candidate or cause, and on and on and on.

Perhaps the biggest lesson learned since the arrival of the consumer Internet in the early 90’s is how avidly people love to connect with other people who share their interests — whether they know them in the real world, or whether they meet them online. I like to paraphrase the movie 2001: “The Internet is filled with people” .

In offering Ning as a hosted service that allows you to create your own social network for anything, we are doing two new things:

* Giving people that ability to create your own social network for anything — versus the AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve-style walled gardens of MySpace/Facebook/Youtube

* As you point out, as a full platform, we give people the ability to customize their social networks at every level from point-and-click feature selection and color selection through the HTML and CSS all the way down to the code (PHP, Javascript, Web services) — also vs the existing walled gardens which either don’t let you customize or cut you off at the HTML

Do we think that everyone is going to create a social network? No — most likely, a minority of people will create the social networks that everyone else will join and use. That’s fine!

Do we think that there will be millions of social networks created and used on Ning? Yes! There are already close to 40,000 on Ning along and we’re just getting started.

The biggest and most gratifying surprise for me since starting Ning is that almost anyone who sees the site has an idea for a social network they want to create.

Will there be a lot of social networks on Ning that get created and abandoned? Sure! Just like there are lots of abandoned web sites. To me, a large number of abandoned networks will be an indicator that we have met our goal of making it so easy to create a social network that anyone can do it in minutes — meanwhile, there are a lot of social networks on Ning that are growing rapidly. All good .

Do we think that people will only use Ning for this? Probably not — big markets draw competition — but we think we have a meaningful R&D lead (largely by virtue of the fact that we have stayed quiet for 2+ years, until the product was ready) and a really killer service.

The core idea behind Ning is that if you give people the capability to do something creative — your own social network for anything — in minutes for free, and with that capability they can satisfy their inherent drive to connect and communicate, then adoption will follow. And that’s what we’re already seeing on ning.com. Come join the fun .

Not sure what you mean as it’s up and running without incident today.

Here’s a summary of our first week: http://blog.ning.com/

Thanks!