Common Name: Ning

Niche: general purpose - Social Media Software

Slogan: "Create Your Own social Network for Anything"

What they say about themselves: "Marc [Andreessen] and I founded Ning in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create your own social networks for anything. Today Ning powers the largest number of social networks on the Internet." - Gina Bianchini, CEO and co-founder

What I say about Ning: I like it! It's fast and easy to setup a new account and start building your network. The interface is easy to customize and you can add or remove features as you like.

Publish blogs, video and photo galleries, news articles, event calendars, setup chat rooms and groups, and start adding members. Invite and "friending" features and a complete user management system let admins control who and what is on their network.

Ning is a FREE hosted solution, (they monetize the sites by placing advertising on your pages).

Ning offers "Premium Services" which for small fees allow you to remove all Ning branding, use your own domain name, control advertising, or add additional disk space and bandwidth to the 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth they include in the free service.

For about $35/mo you can have a totally white label solution that you can build your own social network on -- and all your members can build out their own spaces on your site.

www.ning.com