Ning, a platform that helped users to create their own social networks has raised a whopping $60 million in Series D of funding from unspecified institutional investors. This news was confirmed by co-founder Marc Andreessen in his blog and first came courtesy of VentureBeat. Marc Andreessen said this round of funding was based on Ning’s $500 million pre-money valuation. The company raised $44 million in round C last year, which at that time its pre-money valuation was just $170 million. Well, I don’t know the current Ning’s valuation at $500 million is overinflated, but it definitely provides an early proving ground of a far too much money chasing the Web 2.0 deals.

Marc Andreessen said, “We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter.”

via [washington post]

Ning has started off very well since its beta launch recently. In fact, I didn’t mentioned Ning before in Tag Edge. However I truly believe that it was a feature-rich web application that enable anyone in building a fully customize social network with different web services in minutes. The best part of using Ning is the users can create their social network without the required of any programming languages or design skills. The Ning users can also use their own logos, domain names, customize the CSS and HTML, and etc. in their social networks, as listed in Ning’s developer documentation and advanced customization page.

The other day I came across a post written by its CEO Gina Bianchini, she said the Ning name was derived from a Chinese word, i.e. peace in Chinese. Ning, pinyin as 宁. Peace in Chinese is 安宁 or 宁静, the meaning for peace or quiet respectively. It make sense that own a good and short domain name is very important for a new startup. Just as I mentioned in my another post that explained why The Venice Project has changed to the name of Joost. Or you wonder some people in China has attributed the success of Baidu was due to its Baidu’s name, a poem written during the Song Dynasty, according to this web page.

I truly believe the success of a web 2.0 has been the technology, people, and culture. These elements are important, of course, but before they start-off, a good and with distinct meaning domain name will bring them luck factor and because of that their users have created over 22,000 networks in five weeks. Sorry if I over-exaggerated the power and myth of a domain! This also well explained why they changed the original name from 24 Hour Laundry to Ning.