Palo Alto, Calif. - Ning, a free service that lets users create their own online social networks, has raised a $60 million fourth round of venture capital financing from unnamed investors, PaidContent.org reported.

London - Social music discovery service Last.fm, a unit of CBS (NYSE: CBS), on Thursday released a music application for the 122,000 communities on Ning, a collection of niche social networks. Users of the Ning platform will be able to add Last.fm's application, which displays favorite artists and allows site visitors to launch a radio station based on any of the user's chosen artists. The application was designed to take advantage of Google's (NASD: GOOG) new OpenSocial standard, which will allow such applications to run across a variety of social networks, blogs and websites.

Palo Alto, Calif. - Ning, a free platform that lets anyone create their own online social network, has raised $44 million in its first round of outside funding, led by Legg Mason, the company said on its blog.

Palo Alto, Calif. - Ning on Tuesday announced the launch of a new version of its free platform that allows anyone to create their own online social network.