14 DAY TRIAL // Ning is a part of OpenSocial, as you might have read time and time again so far. What you might not have known until now is the set of statistics from Quantcast which point out that Ning's biggest sites are porn related and that most surely got the zealots up in a riot.
When I'm thinking of zealots, I don't know why I'm picturing white (or black, but by no means brown) robes, hooded, holding religious symbols above their heads and chanting drearily. But enough about my imagination, back to the porn (oops!). Marc Andreessen, Ning's founder, argues that his social network is not seeing most of its traffic because of pornography but, even if it did, that would not be such big a problem as long as the terms of service aren't broken: "we think a better approach is to let people fundamentally do what they want, as long as it isn't illegal and doesn't otherwise violate our terms of service."
He also argues that the statistics from Quantcast don't accurately reflect actual traffic and that the traffic Ning sees is not highly preferential of porn related sites. It's probably true, online tracking services have been known to be flawed and flawed heavily. The other argument that he brought up front, that of freedom of speech is also valid because, after all, the people have done nothing wrong to Ning and there's no real reason for blocking them, while pointing out that a good portion of traffic from both Yahoo! and Google is also porn related.
"To prevent porn, you have to take an activist stand against freedom of expression - you have to get in there and judge content, judge people, judge intent, and take action based on your judgments. I would never criticize a company for doing so, but I don't want to do that, and we as a company don't want to do that."
How about it, to porn or not to porn, that is the modern Internet question.