The story as told over at BoomTown is that Ning wasn’t looking for funding, but Lightspeed Venture Partners wanted to participate in Ning’s funding because of Ning’s amazing growth and Ning was okay with it because they liked the idea of getting dough from a high profile VC like Lightspeed.

Win-Win.

Please take our money, we know it’s only $15 million but please take it.  Okay for you, we’ll take it.  We don’t really need it, you know.

The new $15M investment brings to $119M total funding taken by Ning — remember the founders of Ning are Marc “Mosaic – Netscape” Andreesen and CEO Gina Bianchi.

Who says the bubble has burst?  The new funding round makes Ning’s valuation a whopping $750M.

So far for Ning, monetization has meant advertising — they’ve been using Google’s platform, but are working on their own.  They also charge some modest usage fees for customizations like using your own domain name for you Ning network.

See Oprah Tweet.

If you’ve thought about giving Twitter a try and joining the global conversation, but just haven’t got around to it — here’s a gentle introduction to the world of Twitter and micro-blogging.  The first part of the introduction will get you signed up for Twitter and your account personalized so that it best reflects who you are.

Getting Started

This is the easy part. Go to twitter.com and push the big green button and you’re on your way.

First you’ll have tell Twitter a little about yourself and what you want to be known as on Twitter.

Nothing very surprising here.  First, your full name, your Twitter Username and a password.  Good advice would be to actually show your full name and if you have a special nickname that you like to use, use that as your username — if you don’t have a nickname, try variations on your real name.  You’ll find that many popular usernames are already taken.

Give them an email address.  By default you are sent notifications of Direct Messages  (DMs) and when someone Follows you, but these can be turned off.  Enter those annoying verification codes and push the button.

Next you have a good chance to find out which  of your friends are already on Twitter.

If you use Gmail, Yahoo Mail or AOL Twitter will compare the email addresses in your address book to email addresses on Twitter and give you the opportunity to follow any of your friends that match up.

After you’ve added your friends, you’ll now get a chance to follow a few Twitter celebrities.  You can either pick them all, a few or none.  Showing my age when I looked over this list, very few were familiar to me.

Congratulations! You now have a Twitter account.

Personalizing Your Account

Next, let’s make the account really yours.

Choose settings from the menu in the upper right corner and then account from the sub-menu.

Since Twitter is really about having a conversation you’ll want to give Twitter people (tweeps) who look at your profile some information to allow them to know a little about you.

• Use the more info url box to type a link to somewhere else on the web that they can see more of you.  Popular links would be your blog, your work website, your Facebook page, your pictures on Flickr — you choose, but give them something to look at.
• The one line bio is your chance to be creative and show people a bit about yourself — use it.   You’ve got 160 characters to make your case as to why people should follow you.
• Location is where you live.  Use that one too, people like to be able to place you and, of  course, you’re proud of your hometown.  I live in Mountain View, CA — it’s a nice place to live.

If you were to want to have a private conversation with only a few intimate friends, you can protect your Tweets so that you’ll have to approve who sees them.  Don’t do this at this point in your Twitter experience, look around for awhile and enjoy the sheer mass of humanity on Twitter.  If  in the future, you really want to protect your Tweets, go back and do it then.

Next, let’s add your picture.  Those of us already on Twitter reading your Tweets will want to see what you look like.  Best suggestion is to use a real photo, not a cartoon or a picture of your cat (unless it’s your cat that’s Tweeting).   Your picture will be included with your every Tweet in your follower’s timelines.  A good head shot works best.  Choose your picture from your computer and upload it here.

And there we go, you now have a Twitter account and a personalized profile.  Now we’re ready for our first Tweet.

First Tweet

Choose Home on the menu and you’ll find the Twitter input screen.

Go ahead and write something short and interesting that you want to share.  You have 140 characters and then press update.

Don’t feel like you have to take the question “What are you doing?”  too literally.  Folks who over think that prompt have a tendency to just be boring.  ”Making toast” or “Having Breakfast” may be of vague interest to other members of your Weight Watchers group but probably not to the Twittersphere,

We’re finished and we’ve made a great start to our life on Twitter with a profile interesting enough to be followed.

Next – Twitter 102 – Tweeting, Following and Finding Followers

What used to be said with pride, “I can do three things at once — I multi-task”, now seems like a fraud.

The simple fact is that you can only do one thing well at a time and other than actions controlled by the central nervous system or muscle memory like turning on the car blinker  when you get ready to make a turn or jumping rope, all actions need some level of concentration.

Hence the way to concentrate at work is to single-task.  This white-board is making the rounds.  I got it from marketing nirvana who got it from caterina.net.

The methodology this person developed for doing one thing at a time allows you to:

• send email at any time, but only check it a few times a day on schedule.

• Focus on only 1 to 3 activities a day.

• Minimize chat, which I guess means with co-workers and online (which would include Twitter).

I personally don’t see much hope in trying to be finished at 5:30 pm every day (unless I start at 5:30 am).

Here’s a refinement of the methodology.  Tell us what you think.

If you tend to use the same usernames for most of your social networking site (and it is a good idea), Usernamecheck is a great way to see where you’ve been and what is still unexplored territory.

Type in your username and you’ll get back a report of all the 68 sites that Usernamecheck, well, checks and whether or not your username has been taken.  Also good for checking some of the more common usernames like initials or first initial and last name.

So far, 146155 usernames have been checked according to their web page.

Since the site also links to the dozens of social networking sites, it’s a nice directory for finding new sites that you might find interesting.

Give Usernamecheck a try.

Here’s my report for my favorite wckdgfy name.  Looks like I have miles to go before I sleep.

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