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Marc Andreessen, early web technology pioneer and veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has officially joined Facebook’s board of directors, according to a rather interesting press release just put out by the company.

Andreessen, as many of our readers already know, is currently the co-founder of a create-your-own social network service called Ning. When the Andreessen-Facebook board rumor first came out nearly two months ago, we and many others wondered how that conflict would be managed. Here are some clues.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s statement from the company press release:

“[Andreessen] has experience that is relevant to Facebook in so many ways: Scaling companies that are experiencing extraordinary growth, creating successful technology platforms, and building strong engineering organizations. I know Marc will be a great mentor to me and our leadership team.”

The release goes on to call Ning “a complementary [my bolding] platform to Facebook that allows people to create their own social network with any design, any feature set, and in any language.”

While Facebook’s vision is to use its “social graph” of users, their interests and friend relationships to offer new ways of connecting people (and advertising), Ning’s vision is different. It wants to let people create their own, small social networks focused on niche topics — it doesn’t have an overall social graph.

But Ning is using platforms offered by social networks to create social graphs, of sorts. It already lets users add third-party applications originally designed for Facebook. Ning is already starting to use Google’s rival “Friend Connect” service to fill its networks with data from other sites that Google shares through that service.

Hypothetically, then, maybe we’ll see Ning coming out with niche networks based heavily on Facebook user data. We’ll see how that all works out. The “complementary” aspect is pretty vague right now.

Current Facebook board members include Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and Clarium Capital. Board observers — members who can watch but not vote — include David Sze of Greylock Partners and Paul Madera of Meritech Capital Partners.

[Also somewhat complementary: Andreessen's expression in this old photo I dug up, at the top, and Zuckerberg's expression in the photo beneath it.]

Blekko, a stealth search company started by Topix co-founder Rich Skrenta, has raised $3 million in a second round of funding, according to TechCrunch.

Little is known about the company, and right now its website contains nothing more than a photo of, um, a puppet (see above). But apparently Netscape and Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen, SoftTech VC and Western Technology Investment all think Skrenta (famous for creating the first computer virus) has a good idea, as they’ve contributed the funding at a $23 million post-money valuation. Blekko previously raised a $2 million seed round.

To casual observers, Google seems to have the search market locked up, but that doesn’t stop startups from trying to take on the search giant (or to create a niche outside of Google’s shadow), and it doesn’t stop VCs from investing in them. The funding news comes just two days after Powerset launched its search tool (currently restricted to Wikipedia and Freebase). Powerset has raised $14.5 million, while another stealth search startup, Cuill, has raised a total of $33 million.

Netscape, Opsware and Ning founder Marc Andreessen may soon join Facebook’s board of directors. He’s already verbally accepted the position, Kara Swisher hears.

One obvious question here — and I have an email out to Andreessen for comment — is that Ning’s do-it-yourself social network creator tool is based on the opposite premise from Facebook. Otherwise, as Swisher points out, the two are a nice fit.

Vision-wise, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook is trying to get you, your friends and everyone else to use its site. It grows through network effects, where one friend invites their friends to join — and this invite process continues, the company hopes, until the whole world is on it. Its “social graph” of relationships between its millions of users and information about them is being used by Facebook to launch new features, like “People You May Know” where Facebook recommends users add each other as friends based on friends and other things you have in common. It is this network of relationships that allow third party applications on the site to grow quickly and engage, in some cases, millions of users.

On the flip side, also-Palo-Alto, Calif-based Ning (which has just raised $60 million ) wants anyone create their own social network — each social network is typically completely disconnected from the others, except for basic features like giving a user a Ning ID that they can use across Ning-based networks.

If Swisher is correct, then I have to wonder if there is going to be any sort of relationship that emerges between the two companies. Facebook is looking at ways its users (and developers) can put Facebook data on other sites. Maybe we’ll see a way to create a Ning network based only on your Facebook friends from college? All of this is speculation, and anyway, Andreessen and Facebook have yet to confirm the move.

And if it’s an issue of personality, here’s why Swisher thinks the two are a good fit: She thinks they’re each the “Golden Geek” of their generations. In fact, she originally thought Andreessen would make a great chief operating officer for the company when it was looking for a new one, several months back.

From their arrogant innocence to their visionary qualities to their enfant-terrible charm, it is almost as if [Zuckerberg and Andreessen] were separated at birth. But now Andreessen is all grown up and much, much matured from when I covered him. He has become all calm and sage and he even does a very decent blog. Plus, he has also started and run a number of start-ups after Netscape, giving him deeper managerial experience over the last dozen years. And, best of all, Andreessen knows the pressure of being the best-thing-since-sliced-bread in the tech sector, and its inevitable downside too. Overall, a real mentor and partner for Zuckerberg, making a perfect pair of Golden Geeks.

Facebook’s board is currently comprised of Zuckerberg (who owns the single largest amount of Facebook equity), the company’s first investor and hedge fund manager Peter Thiel and Accel Partner’s Jim Breyer. Greylock Partner David Sze also has observer status on the board.

For more on Andreessen and Ning, check out our coverage of when he spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo last month (pictured).

SocialMedia, a company that lets small Facebook applications get exposure by bidding on ad links within Facebook popular applications, has just raised $3.5 million in financing.

Using the marketplace offered by SocialMedia, a Mill Valley, Calif., company, less popular Facebook applications bid to get ads placed on the pages of more popular Facebook application — thus, increasing their traffic. Advertising one application within another is an increasingly important way of getting Facebook users to try out nascent applications, as more and more applications launch every day.

SocialMedia (see our original coverage) raised the money from Charles River Ventures and angel investors and is poised to enter other social networks. Myspace, for example, announced last night that it would be launching its own platform for developers within the next couple of months. Hi5, Bebo, and other social networks with millions of users, are also planning to launch their own developer platforms.

SocialMedia already owns Trakzor, a popular Myspace application that lets users see who else has viewed their profile pages. Four million Myspace users have installed the Trakzor widget and one million use it per month, giving the company a natural starting point to advertise new Myspace applications — especially as developers without a presence on Myspace look to move in.

SocialMedia’s marketplace on Facebook lets an application owner with many active users — valuable ad space — sell space on its pages to other applications. See screenshot for example: The gray box featuring “Mobile Radar” is the ad.

The company also offers an analytics application on Facebook called Appsaholic, that provides data for app developers on how their ads are performing.

Interestingly, Marc Andreessen is one of the angel investors participating in the round. He also is the co-founder of Ning, the do-it-yourself social network.

Other investors include Jeff Clavier.

[Update 12/11: Twitter filed regulatory papers saying it had raised $4.8 million in a second round of funding, and that it possibly raise a total of $5.4 million]

Confirming what we first reported earlier this week, the fast-growing Twitter messaging service has raised a new round of funding.

The San Francisco company, which has become popular among people wanting to update online what they are doing at any given point of time, has announced the lead investor on the deal, which we hadn’t known earlier: Union Square Ventures, of New York.

The amount was undisclosed. Other investors include CRV, Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway, and Naval Ravikant, among others.

Union Square’s Fred Wilson blogs about it here.

This is an well-timed present for Evan Williams, owner of Obvious, the original parent of Twitter and now large stakeholder, who is getting married tomorrow.

Opsware, a provider of software that automates processes in corporate data centers — such as setting up and managing complex server configurations — has been purchased by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in cash.

This is a happy ending for a company that went through a very long, rocky journey. Originally co-founded by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, it garnered considerable hype at launch, went public, but then struggled badly (picture from Netscape era). It has traveled from one bubble, through a crash, and into an Internet renaissance of late. The sale is remarkable considering some thought it would end in a wreck. Andreessen will pocket $138 million from the transaction.

The company was founded as LoudCloud in 1999 by Andreessen, Ben Howoritz and Tim Howe, an effort that intended to exploit new demands web services were expected to make on the Internet’s infrastructure. It was going to automate many aspects of large-scale data centers and computer systems, as Andreessen waxed nostalgic on his blog post about the sale.

It fired many employees after the bubble burst and sold off part of the company in 2002, changed its name to OpsWare and then refocused on automating IT processes. It has since clawed its way towards profitability. While it still struggles to be profitable, according to the Wall Street Journal, it made over $100 million in revenue during the last fiscal year.

There were other testing times. The company’s former chief financial officer, Sharlene Abrams, left Opsware last year due to charges brought against her by the Securities & Exchange Commission because of a options-backdating scandal at her former job at Mercury Interactive.

Incidentally, HP bought that company for $4.5 billion last year, following Mercury’s accounting problems. Opsware will join Mercury and also-aquired Peregrine Systems in HP’s growing portfolio of enterprise IT management software. Opsware’s automation features will help control the increasing cost and complexity of data centers — one of HP customers’ “critical pain points,” it says. HP says it will now have the capabilities for automating entire data centers — from setting up servers, networks and storage to implementing and managing changes and compliance requirements.

Andreessen claims Opsware is one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world. It even bought a smaller company solving the same problem just a few months ago. Opsware boasts a client list of over 350 large organizations including banks such as Goldman Sachs an JP Morgan Chase, technology companies including Microsoft and Samsung, and the US Department of Defense.

The happy ending? The stock was purchased at $14.25 per share, which Marc Andreessen says was enough to make money for every single investor money who bought and held stock in either Loudcloud or Opsware. Two original investors were Benchmark Capital and Ron Conway.

Most of Opsware’s 550 employees will move to HP. Horowitz will assume management responsibilities within HP.

No wonder Andreessen has had the time and interest to start blogging in the last couple of months. He had this coming, as well as the outrageous amount of cash coming for Ning.

Here’s the latest action (updated):

Airborne mash-up: lawn chair travels 193 miles –Oregon resident Kent Couch tried to fly to Idaho last weekend — in an apparatus made out of his lawn chair carried by 105 large helium balloons. He carried instruments to measure altitude and speed, and also a parachute. He didn’t make it, though. (Image courtesy of AP)

More adult supervision at Facebook — Chamath Palihapitiya, a former AOL executive turned venture capital investor at the Mayfield Fund, will be joining the company as VP of product marketing and operations. Known for helping to turn around AOL’s instant-messaging division, his job now will include helping the company to figure out how to make more money.

Rumors have emerged that Facebook wants to public, and so filling out senior ranks is important. Facebook now says it has 30 million active users. It is reportedly making $30 million annually from $150 in revenue. We’ve heard a big portion of this comes from Microsoft payments for banner ads on the site. Palihapitiya caused controversy earlier this year, when he commented in a French video about a “white male circle of insiders” running Silicon Valley (our coverage here). Facebook also recently hired a new chief financial officer, Mike Sheridan, formerly CFO of video game publisher IGN Entertainment Inc.

MSN search engine market share actually grows — After steady decline, it has grown of late, driven by online games like Chicktionary, Compete reports; analyst Steve Willis has the full explanation:

A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine - to get the points, you have to search with Live.

Google brings Map mashups to its platform — Tomorrow, Google brings Map mashups of data from external sites like Zvents and ChicagoCrime.org to its own platform, Mashable reports.

Index Ventures and 3i launch Seedcamp in Europe — Details are here. Entrepreneurs apply with their “big ideas” before August 12 and the top 20 will be chosen to spend a week in London with industry professionals (VCs, lawyers, marketers, HR people, etc), and from there, the top 5 winners will be announced and they’ll receive 50,000 euros in funding and continued mentorship to get their businesses started.

Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading online-measurement service, scraps rankings based on page views — Instead, it will begin tracking how long visitors spend on Web sites. The move comes as page views lose their value in expressing a site’s importance. Many sites, such as Friendster, have boosted page views with simple networking features. Others, such as those using online video and new technologies such as Ajax, reduce page views.

AOL releases new test version of myAOL — It offers new personalized tools such as myPage, a personal dashboard offering access to content and applications from AOL and other sites; Mgnet, which lets users find new sites and information based on personal preferences; and Favorites, a feed reader that combines user feeds and bookmarks in one place.

Users of TiVo can order movies from Amazon.com directly from their TVs — Details here.

Intel Corp. invests $218.5 million in virtualization software maker VMware – The investment will give Intel ownership of about 2.5 percent of VMware’s outstanding shares after VMware completes its initial public offering. Details here.

Will the video start-ups ever stop coming? — United Talent Agency and advertising start-up Spot Runner have jointly created a company called 60Frames Entertainment to finance and distribute original professional videos online. 60Frames, of Los Angeles, has raised $3.5 million in funding from investors including Tudor Investment Corp. and the Pilot Group, and says it wants to provide higher quality videos than YouTube. Its videos will run a few minutes and cost “in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands” of dollars to produce, the NYT reports.

Talking of video sites, Revision3, another one, finally gets CEO — Recently departed PC World editor Jim Louderback will become CEO at video site Revision3, replacing interim chief exec, Jay Adelson NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes reports.

Sequoia Capital, which recently invested in video site, Funny Or Die, now says there’s too much content — Roelof Botha, the Sequoia Capital partner who also invested in YouTube and Joost — video companies that only help to propagate more content — now says there’s so much information out there that it is overwhelming, and so you need humans to help (thus Sequoia has invested in Jason Calacanis’ human-assisted search engine, Mahalo). See video below, conducted by WSJ’s Kara Swisher (RSS readers will have to go to site):

Ning’s ridiculously large venture capital round — Ning, the company that provides tools for people to create their own social networks, co-founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, has raised a whopping $44 million, on a reported $170 million pre-money valuation. That values the company at a mighty $214 million. Andreessen says on his blog the round was “orchestrated” by the wealthy family firm Allen & Co, of New York, and was led by Legg Mason of Baltimore, with a number of others participating. Andreessen is smart. Large East Coast firms are flush with cash, and are also somewhat removed from the valley, and so won’t realize just how competitive this market is. If you’re curious to know more about Allen & Co., here’s an impossibly long story in Fortune about the firm.

Digg released an application for the iPhone — The news ranking site’s founder Kevin Rosen announces it here.

A link-exchange network for Facebook apps — Developers of applications on Facebook’s platform can exchange links in order to get more attention and traffic, by using FbExchange. More details at GigaOm.

Hey!Spread, a video uploading service that delivers your videos to multiple sites — Upload your video to YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Yahoo Videos, Dailymotion and Blip.tv all at the same time. (Techcrunch).

TwitterGram lets you deliver voice message on Twitter — It comes from Dave Winer, the Web guru who also created the RSS protocol. You can leave the message with a phone.

Here’s the (updated) latest action:

Marc Andreessen getting taste of what it’s like to be a blogger – The Netscape co-founder launched a blog last week. The NYT ran a story about one of his earliest posts. Then he did a good piece about how to hire. And now all the attention has him racing out more posts, including a three part series on The truth about venture capitalists, all very good reads (here, here and here). I recommend reading the last of these, to understand why the debate about the bubble will continue. Marc, welcome to the blogger treadmill.

Video-sharing site Revver’s CEO Steven Starr steps down — This is the second shakeup in six months. No more details given about the change, other than the obvious context: Lots of competition. The company has been losing executives. (CNET)

Xing to buy Plaxo? – Unlikely. A rumor at Techcrunch says Xing, the German version of professional networking site LinkedIn is buying Plaxo, the contact updating service. However, we’ve been told that this isn’t happening. There could be big announcement over next week or so from Xing, though.

Eye-Fi raises $5.5M for camera Wifi — We have the story on VentureBeat NewsWire (for our hard-core readers, here’s another reminder to check that left-hand column).

Apple in talks with major Hollywood studios to get more new films for rental service — The WSJ has details: Will be launched in the fall, and cost $2.99 for 30-day rental of movies. Details are still speculative, though, on who will be participating.

Yigg.de, a remarkable rip-off of Digg.com, gets funding — This is German clone, in both name and presentation. The amount raised is undisclosed but comes from angel investor Roland Metzger and Baytech Venture Capital, the German company says on its blog. It reports 1.4 million unique users a monthly.

SplashCast, the multimedia Flash player, raises angel funding from poker celebrity Phil Hellmuth — Its funding is now about $2 million, according to NewTeeVee

Chris Yeh takes CEO job at Ustream — The company is a competitor to Justin.TV, which is the permanent webcam of a guy named Justin. Ustream wants to let anyone do that. We’ve mentioned them before in our story about Justin.TV’s move to try to do the same. (See Yeh’s blog)

Google worst on privacy? – If you read this report by Privacy International, you should also read the response by search expert Danny Sullivan, who tears it to shreds. Obviously, Google has its own issues with the report, quite emotionally so.

What happens when you piss off attorneys? – Well, you get sued. We reported how Avvo, a site that rates lawyers, had launched, and that some lawyers were upset. Now, one of them is close to suing.

Internet radio station companies fight back — The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board ruled to increase royalty rates earlier this year, starting July 15. RealNetworks, Yahoo, Pandora and Live365 say they’ll be paying more than $1 billion per year.

Gamemaker of popular Desktop TD leaves to run company full-time — He’s joined with another guy, Kottke reports. They’re blogging here.

Private equity riches, will you be picking up the tab? — Blackstone Group, the high-profile buyout firm that plans soon to go public, filed more papers with the SEC that show it could be valued as high as $33.62 billion. Also, the filing shows Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman pulled down $398.3 million in 2006 which, according to Dan Primack, would place him only behind Steve Jobs on the Forbes list of highest-paid public company CEOs. So, as Blackstone issues shares to the public at the top of the private equity bubble, will you be the public investor to buy shares?

Yourminis, which are the widgets offered by Goowy Media, are now more easily compatible with desktop — Previously, you had to download Apollo from Adobe and a widget manager from Yourminis to use that company’s widgets on your desktop. Now, they’re compatible with Micrsoft’s Vista sidebar, without that step. Yourminis’s widgets can easily go anywhere, from blogs to social network pages to personalized homepages like iGoogle Pageflakes, Netvibes and now your Vista desktop. The interface for adding widgets, however, is a bit confusing, and could be simplified by reducing the number of necessary clicks. Goowy CEO Alex Bard assures us that improvements, including support for OSX, are in the works. More here.

Corrected: Motwani is merely an advisor

San Francisco’s CastTV, a site that says it can search video better than leading players like Yahoo and Google by turning up Javascript-hidden files and other information, has raised $3.1 million from well-known venture capitalists.

Video search is a huge potential market: Lucrative advertising can be displayed by the search results. Predictably, a gaggle of players are targeting this area. CastTV has yet to launch — it will do so next month with a testing version, and in summer with a fully public one — but it has taunted with promises it can do much more than its competitors.

It digs up online videos buried behind Flash, Javascript and related plug-in technologies. CastTV can find copies of Grey’s Anatomy that Yahoo can not, for example (we saw a demo; see our coverage). It crawls and extracts metadata about files from code contained in their surrounding pages — all of which supplements the things it knows about the video files. This is significant, because some major sites such as USA Today have intentionally stiffed Google and others by hiding behind Javascript. The funding is also notable because the founders last year said they were not looking for capital for the time being.

Details of the investment are here. Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round. Other investors include Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and angel investor Ron Conway. Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani is an advisor.

Among CastTV’s competitors are Blinkx, Clipblast, Pixsy, PodZinger and Truveo (bought by AOL). Many of these players have been encouraged by Google’s failure to offer its video search capabilities to third-party sites, and hope they can license their technologies before Google does the same.

(Updated with comment from Cisco)

Cisco Systems, the giant supplier of Internet equipment which is falling hard consumer Internet, has bought the assets of Tribe.net, an early social networking player.

The New York Times reported the story first here.

Cisco’s acquisition of the small San Francisco-based Tribe’s technology is the third purchase within a month — and is significant because it reveals a great ambition by the giant router company to move into new areas of the Internet economy. The latest acquired properties — including Five Across and Reactivity — allow consumers to interact in new ways. They facilitate sharing and communication of video and other content — and drive more traffic over the Web. This benefits Cisco because it means growth for its existing business of supplying Internet equipment, such as routers.

Tribe is relatively small, had struggled of late, and was popular primarily among 20-somethings in urban areas like San Francisco and visitors to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Tribe.net will live on as an independent site, under the direction of founder Mark Pincus. However, Cisco will acquire the company’s technology and most of its eight employees — and will use it to help Cisco’s corporate clients build their own versions MySpace and YouTube.

One clarification of the NYT story. We’ve been following the Tribe story, and know that Pincus had sought to do things like build networks for third-parties, and in fact had talked with Bono’s antipoverty campaign, One.org about building a network for it. However, after Pincus departed as CEO, the new CEO rejected the deal, in an effort to push Tribe as a destination site. Bono’s network now has 2.5 million members, and as the NYT notes, it was won by Yahoo.

Pincus returned last year in an effort to save Tribe. Rumors are the Cisco purchase was in single-digit millions, which makes it likely less than the amount invested in Tribe (at least $9.5 million across two rounds from Mayfield Fund and others).

Notably, Marc Andreessen, Netscape co-founder and now co-foudner of Ning, a site that lets people build social networking sites (and thus a competitor to Cisco) takes a swipe at the router giant: “The idea that Cisco is going to be a force in social networking is about as plausible as Ning being a force in optical switches,” he tells the Times.

Update: Eric Chan, head of strategy and marketing for the Cisco “Media Solutions Group,” the unit leading Cisco’s Web 2.0 offensive, said the Tribe technology complements Five Across’. While Five Across builds white-label social networks for corporate clients, Tribe’s technology is stronger in helping users discover new relationships. Chan said there will likely be more announcements in the near future. The goal, he said, is to “provide somewhat of a MySpace in a box” for customers. Chan said he took note of Andreessen’s comment about Cisco, but declined to respond.

Ning, the Palo Alto start-up, has relaunched to let you build your own full-fledged social network.

Ning announced the launch three days ago, and since then, users have created 5,000 new networks, chief executive Gina Bianchini tells us — though is difficult to know how many of these accounts are like the ones we often create (to tinker with, only to never go back again). Ning now reports 35,664 networks, up from 5,000 a year ago. It is doing something right: Even before the launch, page views reached 20 million per month, twenty times the traffic a year ago, the company says.

You can choose whether your network is private or public.

Ning’s features are similar to the ones offered by competitors such as Yahoo Groups and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces.

Ning offers a big advantage over those others, though: The ability to tailor it to your own needs, right down to the code, if you want.

On Ning, you can mix and match features as you like, including comments, photos, videos, blogs, friend widgets, invitations, messaging, search, tags — the list goes on. Further, all of these are offered in a so-called open API, meaning that the source code is open for you to tamper with. You can modify it to create more options than Ning offers by default. Moreover, your network can freely exchange information with another network. We’ve summed up the main points, but there’s a lengthy (half-hour) interview with co-founder Marc Andreessen and Gina below. Andreessen, Netscape co-founder, is the main backer of Ning (it has spent about $9 million so far).

In the video, interviewer Robert Scoble asks the important question. “Why do we need more social networks?” He cites Marc Canter, who has a similar vision in his PeopleAggregator: “Every one needs a social network.” But Scoble retorts: “But I’m like, ‘why?’” Andreessen answers that just as people began to want their own Web sites or blogs in ways we didn’t appreciate earlier, they will want social networks.

Still, we’re left wondering exactly why, and whether it will really be Ning they’ll go to. After all, simple blog or Web site software, from Wordpress to FreeWebs, Blogger and Vox, are all becoming simpler and more flexible, letting you place widgets on those blogs or sites that offer the same sort of social features offered by Ning. And if you want to customize to greater degree, you’re probably serious enough to hire someone to do it, even for a few thousand bucks using other software — so that you don’t have to pay $5 a month to Ning in perpetuity, plus another $20 a month if you want to keep Ning’s ads off the site (so that you can claim your own ad revenue), plus another $10 a month or 5GB storage/100GB of bandwidth (we note, however, that this last charge is quite reasonable, since you’ll have to pay for bandwidth somehow).

Updated with full list of names of angel investors

How do you build the perfect local community Web site — with news, events, comments and more?

If you manage to, it will be a grand slam. It becomes the talk of the town, people spend more time going there, and local advertisers spend money there.

A wave of companies have tried, but failed. But Outside.in, a new Brooklyn, NY start-up is looking very good — as good, if not better than any we’ve seen so far. Its visual presentation is nice and simple (see screenshot at bottom). It uses AJAX and other technologies to improve upon efforts preceding it.

Here’s the background: Newspapers have largely dropped the ball. A dozen or so Internet companies have tried to adapt the community concept online, but none have nailed it. There’s Yelp, which specializes in reviews of bars and restaurants. There’s Judysbook, which began with a broader community feel, but has since moved toward shopping. There’s Insiderpages, which is struggling, and focused on business listings. Smalltown focuses on local business, too. Topix gives you community news. Backfence gets closer, as does ePodunk to coverage of wider community events — but their execution and user interfaces have remained unimpressive. Craigslist provides a local marketplace, but stops there.

Outside.in takes both existing content (from local bloggers, city governments, movie listings) and user generated content, and packages them into local sites.

For each town, Outside.in lets you see stories, comments, places and “neighbors,” or registered users. It has one useful, powerful feature we haven’t seen before: You can switch the focus of your region easily — using a map feature at the top left of your region. This lets you zoom in or out to include more or less surrounding regions or cities — and the information, news, events and comments all adjust in real time.

So you can limit a search for crime to Park Slope, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Then you can search for Italian restaurants across the entire city. Or you can look for poetry readings in Park Slope and surrounding neighborhoods. All by just scrolling within a map.

There’s a lot to look at here. Outside.in provides a URL for each city (it adds a +1 to the URL if you zoom out and see a mile of surrounding area, etc), but also for each place. For example, there’s an entry for the Whole Foods in Brooklyn, which is under development, and creating considerable community debate. People can go to the URL and see the latest stories by local bloggers, and can submit their own comments.

In this way, Outside.in wants to be a Wikipedia for local places. How does it monitor the comments and entries? Well, like Wikipedia, it has the crowd controllers. Of its eight full-time employees, three are chaperoning the site, and 12 more freelancers are helping out.

It is early days, and it is a little buggy. For example, in Palo Alto, Calif., some “top places” are actually based in places like Mountain View (in part, because Outside.in is still figuring out how to deal with regions like the Bay Area where cities merge into each other, and because it wants to show places with buzz within ten miles from you).

Founder Steven Johnson gave us a demo today. He was the co-founder of the online magazine FEED and community site, Plastic.com.

Hollywood producer Andy Karsch, and John Seely Brown seed-funded the company with $200,000. Yesterday, the company announced it raised $900,000 more from Union Square Ventures, Milestone, Village Ventures and individuals Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder), Esther Dyson, George Crowley, John Borthwick and Richard Smith.

This will be fun to watch. We’ve been waiting for a decent site to come along. While Outside.in has a long way to go, it is looking very smart.