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Ning, the popular online service that allows users to create their own custom social networking sites, launched Ning Apps today. Ning Apps gives users the ability to embed over 90 new apps and widgets on their social networks. Given that Ning Apps is based on the OpenSocial standard, however, developers will surely create a lot more apps in the near future. Ning added basic OpenSocial support to its service last year. At that time, however, Ning only supported about 30 applications and users could only add OpenSocial applications to their own profiles but could not publish them on their network sites so that everybody could see them.

According to this year's Comscore stats, consumer publishing platform Wikia has surpassed DIY social network competitor Ning for monthly unique visitors. Since July 2008 the company's traffic has more than doubled from 2.8 million to 6.5 million unique US visitors per month. Despite abandoning Wikia search in early March, it seems Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has built another great company. As of this evening, Wikia's CEO Gil Penchina is announcing the company's profitability due to its custom sponsorships program.

Just last October, we reported that Ning hosted half a million social networks, and today, the social network provider announced that it has hit 1 million networks. Ning, which hosts custom social networks, was co-founded by Marc Andreesen and launched in 2005. Of course, as is so often the case, while Ning now has about 22 million registered users, only 6.1 million of these are active users. And while 1 million networks definitely sounds impressive, only about a fifth of these are currently active.

Social networking platform Ning announced support for the OpenSocial standard today. Thanks to this, developers can now easily create applications for the Ning platform. At this time, Ning already features 30 applications that users can embed into their profile pages, including support for file sharing with Box.net and poll creation from Polldaddy. One of the highlights of Ning's implementation of OpenSocial is that the widgets automatically adapt themselves to the branding and design of the individual networks.

Social networking provider Ning yesterday announced that it now hosts half a million social networks on its platform. Ning launched in February 2007 and has seen rapid growth and mainstream adoption ever since. According to Ning's co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini, Ning users now create a new social network every 30 seconds. As Dan Farber reports, 65 percent of these social networks are currently active and 3 percent of Ning's users are paying $19.95 a month for Ning's premium service.

The San Francisco based social groupware provider Grou.ps announced today that it has secured a Series A round of financing for $1.1 Million in a deal led by Golden Horn Ventures. Grou.ps has also announced that it is open sourcing a restricted version of its code under the Affero Public License.

Grou.ps aims to provide users with a comprehensive set of tools to collaborate online and currently has about 200,000 active users worldwide.

Earlier this week something interesting happened in the world of social networking: Verizon, which this week became America's largest mobile carrier after moving to acquire Alltel, moved its branded social network to Facebook. The company announced a plan to shut down its Verizon Community site -- a moderately popular corporate social network -- in favor of its 18,000 member strong Facebook fan page. Right now, Facebook Pages can't be considered full social networks, but could they ever be the best place to center your social media strategy?

Here at ReadWriteWeb we spend a lot of time reading the blogs of companies we write about (send yours to tips@readwriteweb.com) and we've found that some of them are just plain fun. An interesting company blog can be a great way to draw in new people through relevant content of general interest - and some of them will stay to check out the service you provide.

Some companies just blog about updates to their own technology and that's good for existing users to see. Others are fun to read whether you're a user or not. Here are some of the company blogs we recommend reading for a good time.

With 1.3 billion people on the web today it's a safe bet that at least a few of them have shared experiences and the promise of the web as a global support group is something that is finally being realized. There have been specialized web sites for specific ailments for as long as there has been a world wide web, covering everything from lung cancer to obesity to social anxiety to alcoholism. But over the past several years, a new breed of general social networks geared toward physical and mental health support has begun to emerge. These sites link people with shared medical experiences and allow them to support one another in difficult times. Below are ten web sites that fall into this new category of "support group 2.0."

When MySpace first launched, one of its main draws was the music offered by independent artists on the site, something which generated a strong following among new musicians and their friends. These young artists were using the platform as a way to get their name out there, share their tunes, and attract a fan base.

Wikia, the independent commercial wiki site founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, is releasing components of its very nice social networking toolset under the GNU General Public License 2.0.

The ability to set up an Open Source social network is now available to anyone who can put a Mediawiki install on their servers. Look out Ning and other proprietary social networking platforms!

BricaBox is a new type of service that combines elements of social networking and content creation into a medium it calls a "social content platform." The NYC-based startup hopes to do for social content what Ning did for social networks. It launches quietly early this morning in public beta.

It probably seems like a thin difference, but within the social content platform lies an elegant concept. The site delivers a platform upon which any sort of content vehicle can be built.

TechCrunch's Mike Butcher reports about Turkish social network Yonja's $12.5 million worth of funding and asks, "What is it about Turkey?." As a Turkish native, I think I am the right person to answer that question and also, this can be an opportunity to shed some light on the latest intriguing developments at Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, and Ning, as they relate to the European and world social networking markets.