Last.fm Builds Music Application for Ning’s Growing Platform of Social Networks

Ning – a platform for creating social networks – is among the early supporters of the OpenSocial, which is a common programming interface for Web-based social networking applications.

“Our goal is to encourage open participation by the web’s best developers and the world’s most passionate music fans,” said Martin Stiksel, co-Founder of Last.fm. “Teaming with Ning to embrace the new OpenSocial standard is a first step towards an easy solution for our users to share and build their music tastes virtually wherever they are.”

“We love that Last.fm was able to quickly develop a mini-experience of their service as an OpenSocial application now accessible by any of the 122,000 social networks across Ning which choose to add it,” said Gina Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Ning. “With OpenSocial, Network Creators and members of any social network on Ning have more and more ways to make their networks the exact right perfect thing for them.”

Beginning today, users of the Ning platform will be able to add Last.fm’s music application to their personalized homepage on any of Ning’s network of sites. Music fans will also soon be able to add the Last.fm application directly to a host of social networking sites including MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, among the many other sites participating in OpenSocial.

Last.fm’s music application will enable music fans to create a personalized display of their favorite artists. The application can be customized according to taste, and offers the ability to launch a radio station based on any of the user’s chosen artists. The application marks the first step in Last.fm’s initiative to develop for OpenSocial.

About Last.fm

Founded in 2002 in London, Last.fm is the online, social music revolution that connects people with music and artists with listeners. By joining the Last.fm community, music fans can choose to share their music preferences by linking their media player to the Last.fm database. This database is populated continually with over 600 million monthly track submissions from Last.fm music fans. As a result, Last.fm can intelligently recommend songs, artists, local concerts and even other members based on their musical tastes. Through its partnerships with EMI, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG, independent aggregators The Orchard and IODA, and more than 100,000 independent musicians and 20,000 labels that upload music directly to the site, the Last.fm community has access to one of the biggest music libraries of any music website. Learn more about Last.fm at www.last.fm.

About Ning

Ning is a platform for creating your own social network for anything. On Ning, you can create a social network in a few seconds for free for any topic, with your choice of features, your choice of language, with your brand, your look and feel, as well as your own members. Plus, as a platform, you don’t have to appeal to Ning for the features you want as you can add them yourself. Platforms give everyone the freedom to create a million variations and endless possibilities.