Mark Andreesen discusses social networking tools, including the one he's selling.

My son's AP English class used a site built on Ning to talk about A Farewell to Arms. It worked well, and I could see a project team or other work group using a similar product to good effect.

Not everyone buys Andreesen's arms-lengthing of Google Friend Connect. Scoble lays out the virtues of the Google way: "Very few corporate site owners, after all, will want to throw out everything they've done just to build some identity, commenting, and social networking features into their sites...In Google's approach you just copy some JavaScript code over to your corporate site and, voila, you have a social network and features added to your site."

The crowd at the CIO Summit seemed to be listening hard when Wachovia's Bill Letcher made the case for using Microsoft as a the basis of a corporate social net.