The idea behind Clearvale is to provide a white-label social networking platform similar to Ning, but focused specifically on businesses. “We were among the first technology companies to help the enterprise understand how to do business on the web, and we feel poised to do it again — but this time for the Enterprise 2.0 era,” said Pehong Chen, founder and CEO. As part of the rollout of Clearvale, the company says it will be offering an app store for social networking tools, driven by an open API.

The name BroadVision may not be as well known as Netscape or Yahoo, but the company was one of the original Web 1.0 superstars. It went public not long after Netscape set the market for web companies on fire in 1995, but failed to make it through the web bust of the late 1990s. The stock was delisted from the Nasdaq for a time, and Chen said that BroadVision spent the past decade or so restructuring financially and becoming a much smaller business and is now ready to be reborn as a Web 2.0 software provider, offering custom social networks for businesses. In effect, Chen said he’s betting the company on this new strategy.

“We were a pioneer of e-business platforms, but we suffered because we overextended ourselves,” Chen told me in an interview prior to the Clearvale launch. “For the last decade we have been consumed with fixing that, mostly financially. We have survived, and have come back with a vengeance, with a solid balance sheet and lots of cash in the bank.” He said after watching the rise of social media and tools such as Facebook, he realized that businesses needed some way of creating “their own community online” and that BroadVision could offer that. Although software such as Yammer, Socialcast and Jive offer elements of this, Chen said no one had an “all-in-one” solution like BroadVision.

Although Clearvale can be implemented as company-hosted software for institutions such as banks and others that need to control their software more closely, Chen said it’s designed to be a social networking platform in the cloud, hosted primarily by Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure but also by major partners such as Softbank, which Chen said intends to offer social networking features to its mobile customers that are based on Clearvale. Companies such as Synaptics and Air Exchange are already using the software to create internal networks for staff and suppliers, he said. (For more on the cloud, attend the GigaOM Network’s annual cloud computing conference, Structure, June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.)

BroadVision’s existing business — building and managing web portals for companies — continues to make money, Chen says, but it has become a much smaller business than it was in the red-hot Web 1.0 days. Last year, the company had sales of $28 million, while at the peak it brought in close to 10 times that amount every year. “We may be smaller, but we are smarter,” Chen said. And what about competition from Microsoft’s SharePoint and other enterprise solutions? The BroadVision CEO said that Microsoft in particular has an existing legacy businesses that it has to protect. BroadVision, one the other hand, “doesn’t really have a lot to lose,” he said.

At first glance, Clearvale looks a little like BroadVision came up with the product while playing Web 2.0 “buzzword bingo” — it has social networking, is in the cloud, has an open API and an app store, and so on. But Chen is right that many businesses are looking for easy ways to implement social networking tools inside their companies, and BroadVision has an established reputation as an enterprise-software vendor. Whether it can make the transition to being a Web 2.0 company remains to be seen.

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Ning, in a dramatic about-face, is shuttering its free social networking platform to concentrate solely on fee-paying networks and cutting 40 percent of its staff. Jason Rosenthal, who became CEO in mid-March after Gina Bianchini left, said in an email to employees that he’s “taken a hard look at our business in the 30 days since I became CEO, and I’ve decided to focus the company 100 percent on our paid networks business.” Rosenthal said that the free part of Ning would be phased out “soon,” and that existing networks would either have to convert to paying for the premium service or “transition off Ning.”

The shift from mostly free to 100-percent paid is a major strategic shift for Ning, which gained a lot of media attention not just because of co-founder and ex-CEO Marc Andreessen, whose former company Netscape Communications helped usher in the modern web era, but also because — in contrast to the “walled garden” approach taken by Facebook — Ning’s free platform provided a place where anyone could build their own social network. But Ning’s recent move is also a sign that the much-hyped “freemium” model might not be the road to riches many seemed to think it was. In a post on the 37signals blog, David Heinemeier Hansson notes that “Eyeballs still don’t pay the bills.”

The obvious implication from both the shutdown of Ning’s free offering and the staff reduction — not to mention the speed with which Rosenthal is making the change, and without communicating it to the company’s networking users beforehand — is that Ning couldn’t sustain its business at that level. Is that a sign that the “social networking for all” phenomenon was simply not workable? If nothing else, it suggests that providing free services (in the hope that some users will pay) doesn’t scale at the rate Ning and its investors were hoping it would. And there’s no question that some big bets have been placed on the company: last year, it raised another round of financing that gave it valuation of $750 million.

Rosenthal said that Andreessen and his venture fund Andreessen Horowitz would “work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies.” The Ning CEO alsosaid that within the next three months, the company would launch “the next generation of Ning, which will include a range of new premium features and services for our Network Creators, a new mobile experience, and a new set of APIs.”

The response from network creators has not been pretty, to say the least. The first comment on the Ning Networks blog post about the changes says:

What the hex!? This better be a late April Fools joke! I thought I found something great and now I have to cancel all my networks because Ning wants MONEY! I’m not made of it and Ning’s the only platform that actually gives you your own social network. In plain English, this idea sucks, and I hope it’s just a bad joke!

Below is the full text of Rosenthal’s letter to employees:

Team,

When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase
out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.

As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies.

I’ve never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months.

We’ll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flick user Darren Hester

“Nothing else is changing — I remain Chairman, the current management team remains exactly the same, and the Ning service continues unchanged,” says Andreessen, chairman and co-founder of Ning. The company says it has 2.3 million user-created Ning Networks and more than 45 million registered users and is adding million new registered users every 12 days and and 5,000 Ning-powered networks every day. The company has raised more than $110 million in funding and is valued at over $500 million.

In the meantime, here’s a rundown of the updates each site released:

Facebook — The social network now lets people tag friends in their status updates using the @ symbol, which closely resembles the “@ reply” function popular on Twitter (We predicted Facebook would make this move back in June.) The social network also said it was open sourcing Tornado, the web server framework that powers FriendFeed — essentially using FriendFeed’s technology to mimic Twitter. The release of the open-source web server framework is intended to enable developers to build applications that let users publish their status updates in real time.

Twitter — The micromessaging site modified its terms of service, including opening the door for advertisements on its platform. In doing so, it’s taking a page from Facebook’s playbook, since advertising is the current business model the social network uses. Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone also wrote in a blog post that Twitter “is allowed to ‘use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute’ your tweets because that’s what we do.” Likewise, Facebook stores all user data in its servers, which has previously gotten the social network into trouble.

Ning — The company, which lets people create their own social networks, launched an application platform for developers and subsequently released more than 90 apps on its network. The platform lets Ning’s network creators add apps to their sites. Though Facebook apps are aimed at users, Ning is adopting a feature that’s been a part of Facebook’s platform since 2007.

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Blown away by the speed of the browser, and its radical and innovative JavaScript engine, Andreessen called the launch of Chrome an “extraordinary event.” He said that it is going to make Firefox and Internet Explorer compete actively with Chrome and that it would ultimately boost browsers as a whole. Mozilla CEO John Lilly had shared similar sentiments in an interview earlier this week.

“Microsoft can build good products when they want to,” he said. The barons of Redmond released a version of Internet Explorer that was superior to a bloated version of Netscape and gave it away for free, driving a stake through Netscape’s heart. That’s ancient history, anyway. Andreessen thinks that IE and Firefox will have to accelerate their plans and introduce new technologies. He thinks that all this is going to boost the performance of JavaScript. Giving into nostalgia for a minute, he pointed out that it was 10 feet away from his desk at Netscape that JavaScript first got going. He said.

More than a decade later it is everywhere. “If JavaScript gets any faster, then developers will question if they should develop in Flash or (Microsoft’s) Silverlight (technologies),”
“Super interactive browser that sits atop a super-fast connection…now interesting things will happen over the next 5-10 years,” he said. While he talked at length about Facebook, Twitter, Qik and Ning, it was his comments about the Chrome browser that were quite interesting.

Why? Because back in the day he was one of the first few people to talk about the browser as an operating environment. I had bought into the concept then, and I buy into it now. With always-on connections feeding networked devices and mobile phones, the browser-as-an-operating-environment is close to becoming a reality.

During the Q&A session, in response to a question, Andreessen said the share of Google’s browser market share depends on the company’s ability to fully productize the browser and then distribute it.

P.S.: I tried to take notes as fast as I could, but since Marc speaks too fast I apologize if some of the quotes might be wee bit mangled.

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Google will announce its new social networking initiative, Open Social on Thursday. Joining Google and its Orkut social network are other partners such as XING, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Newsgator and Ning.

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications on the web. These common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications.

OpenSocial attacks Facebook where it is the weakest (and the strongest): its quintessential closed nature. Several Facebook developers have groused that a special Facebook-only mark-up language makes the task of writing Facebook apps tougher. (Recommended reading: Anil Dash on the historical limitations of proprietary development platforms.)

Google has managed to attract some of the key Facebook app companies Flixster, Rock You, Slide, and iLike to work with them on OpenSocial. The lure of expanding their widget base to other Social platforms such as hi5 and XING, perhaps was too hard for them to resist.

Even if you take Facebook out of the equation, the task of writing and adapting widgets for the every increasing number of social platforms was going to turn into a colossal mess. OpenSocial looks to address some of those issues. This is a mild negative for start-ups who are offering middleware services around widgets.

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There is a hidden cost to this. I pay around $100 a year for the dotMac service, which gets me a puny 250 MB of storage, for email and iDisk. For most of us heavy email users, the syncing and all is going to need a lot more storage that currently being offered. I get about a gigabyte worth of email in a week, and this includes PDF files, photos, and of course the all important “tips.” If I have to sync these between my two PowerBooks, well I would need four times the storage, just for email alone. In other words, another $50 a year (according to current Mac prices!) In recent days, Apple has been pushing its dot Mac service hard, and is trying to sign-up as many as possible … perhaps in preparation of the Tiger launch. Storage should not cost this much, as Yahoo and Google have shown us.

Stephen Castellano in his post about the Moore’s Law and Storage points out that with Google trying to replace our hard drives with online storage, there will be disruptive implications far “beyond the technology sector.” $129 for the OS, $150 for this … well no wonder Steve’s company is in dollars! Atleast this will ensure that I don’t have to use Windows!

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Consolidated Edison plans to begin testing the technology in a high-rise apartment building on the Upper West Side in the next several months. The utility decided to expand its use of the technology after a successful pilot program in Westchester County that began in July 2002 and cost $480,000, Con Ed officials said. While the technology is several years from being ready for widespread use, experts and regulators say it has potential.

Doesn’t it beg the question: if it is years away, isn’t that enough time for Bells to completely dominate the local access market through its fiber pipes? Ironically, the same technology points out that it isn’t costing Con-Ed to run the experiment. “In June, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority gave $200,000 to Con Ed and Ambient to explore the technology,” The Times adds. In addition, imagine a utility company getting positive press. Why won’t they make positive comments, and share the glory.

“I don’t think cable and D.S.L. companies are scared of this entrance by the utilities into the Internet market,” said Bruce Leichtman of the Leichtman Research Group, a broadband media research and analysis firm in Durham, N.H. “The reason is that this market is already largely taken.”

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