There’s been a small fuss brewing (not even large enough to be a brouhaha — more of a kerfuffle) around Ning, the social-networking engine run by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and the lovely and talented Gina Bianchini, and a post about how a large amount of Ning’s traffic goes to social networks based around porn. This was picked up on by Mashable and Valleywag, among others.

Marc has responded in a lengthy post at his blog, and I have to say that I’m glad he did. He takes a refreshingly clear-headed look at the issue, and says several things that I think are worth saying — including the fact that you can’t take as gospel any of the numbers that come from Quantcast or Alexa (especially Alexa) or any of the other traffic measuring firms. Surely we should all know that by now.

His other point is that Ning is content-agnostic — and so it should be. There are social networks based around porn? Big surprise. The Internet is a social network based around porn, for pity’s sake. The reaction from some bloggers has a real high-school tone to it, as though they were reporting Ning to the principal because they caught him looking at a Playboy magazine out behind the portables.

I’ll say this for Marc Andreessen: he knows how to make a splash. First, he writes a whole series of excellent (and lengthy) blog posts with advice for startups — so excellent that my friend Paul Kedrosky jokes about how he’s making the rest of us look bad — and then he announces a blockbuster financing round of $44-million for Ning, which values the company at something north of about $200-million and has got everyone talking.

My friend Rob Hyndman, a lawyer who advises technology startups, says he is skeptical of Ning’s ability to justify that kind of money, and so is Rob Hof at BusinessWeek — who draws a comment from the man himself by comparing Ning to Facebook. Don Dodge says that he doesn’t think Ning’s revenues will scale. And Umair comes right out and says Legg Mason’s investment in Ning is an example of dumb money. But is it really? I think some of those criticisms miss the point about what Ning is trying to do. Whether it will succeed or not remains to be seen, but I think Ning is trying to become the “Intel inside” for social networks.

In some ways, Ning’s strategy is the opposite of Facebook’s. Whereas the Mark Zuckerberg show is all about bringing people — and eventually transactions — to Facebook, and becoming a platform in that sense, Ning wants to be the plumbing for any kind of social network. The company is even happy to help you turn your soc-net into a widget that you can then embed in Facebook.

I used Ning to set up an ad-hoc social network for a class reunion I was involved in organizing, and it was easy enough to use that even the ancient classmates I was dealing with could figure it out. I think Ning’s vision is that instead of everyone going to Facebook or MySpace, there will eventually be hundreds of thousands or even millions of social networks, all tied in to each other in some way (through Google’s SocialSystem perhaps?).

Ning clearly wants to power that explosion — and the way it has been configured is easily powerful enough to do that, I think, given enough horsepower and resources to allow it to scale. Will it succeed? I haven’t a clue. But I think the strategy is an interesting one.

For something that was created by legendary Netscape founder Marc Andreessen — the Blake Ross of his day, for you Firefox fans — the social-media “engine” called Ning has kind of been flying under the radar for awhile. As Mike Arrington notes at TechCrunch, the initial release of the service was somewhat underwhelming, and so I think a lot of people sort of forgot about it. But it has steadily improved, and just rolled out some more enhancements.

I have some first-hand experience with Ning, because I decided awhile back to use it as a tool for helping to plan a journalism school reunion that I’m involved with. It’s been quite awhile since I was at Ryerson in Toronto (don’t ask how long or I’m liable to punch you), and many of my former classmates have scattered to the winds. After a couple of members of the group sent out some emails trying to get a reunion under way, it became obvious that having a single place to co-ordinate things would make a lot of sense. One or two people mentioned MySpace, but it seemed too — well, MySpacey. Then I thought of Ning.com.

The reason Ning came to mind was that a Toronto group — helmed by Mark Dowds — created a site related to a new “open office” concept called Indoor Playground. It seemed relatively simple to add members, send out updates, upload photos and had a nice, clean look to it, so I decided to try it out. In just a few minutes I had the site set up (there is even more customization available with the new features), and apart from a few glitches in getting people signed up — it’s invitation only — it was a no-brainer.

Further reading:

Om has some thoughts about the new Ning, and Scoble has an interview with Marc Andreessen and CEO Gina Bianchini up at Podtech — and Ms. Bianchini has a post on the Ning blog with some of the insights that she has gained from starting the company (I particularly like the “Underhype your service” one). Frantic Industries has a good overview of the service too. Steve O’Hear at ZDNet has some thoughts too, and Don Dodge wonders whether it’s any better than Live Spaces or Yahoo Groups.