VentureBeat

There are at least 41 companies that offer services to help you create your own social network. IntroNetworks differentiates itself by analyzing data about members of a network and telling each user which other users they have the most in common with — something that professional social network Visible Path and only half a dozen other competitors also do.

For example, Virgin Galactic, the commercial spaceship tour to be unveiled later this year, will use introNetworks to offer a social network for people who have signed up to one day to become tourist-astronauts. Each user will be able to create user profiles, add career information, interests, activities and more, then introNetworks will create a visualization graph showing other users and see what other future astronauts they are most like. Considering the price of space flight tickets is $200,000 a pop, one assumes the average user will be extremely well-heeled and have a fascination with space technology — so this could turn out to be a high-end geek niche social network.

Santa Barbara, Calif.-based introNetworks has been around since the early part of this decade. Maybe it has been flying under the radar (or above the stratosphere?) — among the many white-label social networks out there. I certainly haven’t heard much about it. Still, some white-label social networks claim to be growing fast. One, Ning, says it is adding 2000 new niche social networks every day and now has “up to” 315,000 of them in total.

Regardless of how successful introNetworks may be, it uses Adobe’s Flash technology. Perhaps because of this, Adobe Systems, along with the Arther J. Rice III Living Trust, has put a total of $4.5 million in the company, following up on a previous investment in it.

Santa Barbara-based IntroNetworks has raised $2.7 million in a first round of capital to develop a social-networking service for companies and events.

There are a ton of these business-oriented social networks, from Visible Path, to Five Across and Facebook’s corporate offering — along with blogging and wiki software, all making headway in replacing or supplementing existing intranet directories that most big companies already have.

Chief exec Mark Sylvester says about 500,000 people have used the service, through deployments at HP, Autodesk, Business Objects, Dow Jones, Intel and other companies — including at events, where thousands of people are registered at the network at a time.

IntroNetworks is built on Flash, and lets users create profiles with descriptions of their tastes, wants and aspirations with simple one-word self-descriptors (see screenshot below). The idea is that companies can use it to get easy, useful information about their employees, or about participants in events they hold.

For example, employees can tap into a central database to locate fellow employees based on their skills, experience, availability, or other criteria. Conference organizers and employers can stay in touch with event participants and clients.

The real drive behind this, though, appears to Adobe’s desire to support its Flash technology platform. Adobe Systems participated in the funding round. If you play around with the site, you’ll notice the way Flash is showcased to provide a highly visual interface. Users just drag words from pre-defined lists into profile bins, similar to the way AJAX technology lets you move boxes around the screen. Graphical sliders can also be set up to record how people rank themselves on various scales.

Users can search the resulting database of profiles by keyword, and results can be presented in the form of a dartboard-like graphic divided into quadrants and concentric zones.

It is just the latest in a trend by software companies to personalize products. Last month, a Seattle company Entellium introduced Rave, which introduces similar techniques to customer relationship management software. There, you build a profile of your clients and sales prospects that includes photographs and lists of their likes, dislikes and buying interests, and then given ratings about how likely they are to buy something. The New York Times has the story.