A company that includes the creator of the Netscape web browser on its executive team has relaunched a service that lets people create their own online social networks.

Ning Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif, which boasts Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc Andreessen as its chief technology officer, launched a revamped version of its self-named service on Tuesday.

The company was twice forced to take Ning offline for about an hour in the morning and again in the evening after a database bug introduced in the final pre-launch hours "slowed the networks on Ning down to a crawl," CEO Gina Bianchini said in a post to the firm's blog late Tuesday.

The success of services such as News Corp.-owned MySpace has drawn attention to social networking sites from media companies seeking targeted audiences they can deliver to advertisers.

Ning says it powers more than 30,000 social networks with members in more than 176 countries.

"Today's social networking services are fantastic, but they are very similar in approach to AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy in the early nineties. They have a fixed and rigid view of what people can do," Andreessen, who co-founded Ning in 2004, said in a written statement.

"The web is filled with people who want the freedom to create, to express themselves, and to connect with other people in new and interesting ways. Hopefully, Ning contributes in a small way to this growing freedom for everyone."

The new version of Ning lets social network creators customize the appearance and features they offer.

Features include videos, photos, music, discussion forums, user profiles, and blogs — all offered on MySpace to its own users but Ning grants greater control over the final product. Creators can also designate whether their sites are public or private.

The free version of the service gives Ning the right to run its own ads on the social networks its users create. Operators can opt to pay $19.95 US a month to run their own ads or no ads at all.

Ning also offers expanded capabilities for additional monthly fees. For $4.95 US, creators can use their own top-level domain name along the lines of MySpace.com rather than a subdomain like myspace.ning.com, and for $9.95 US they can increase storage space and network bandwidth in five gigabyte and 100 GB increments respectively.