Ten social networking sites to follow
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Ten social networking sites to follow
Previously, “social networking” was the exclusive territory of sites like Myspace and Facebook. Now, a ton of smaller, more specialized social networking sites have crept up, each serving a particular niche. Here are a few notable ones:
+ Bebo
Bebo is a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment. This is great if you’re always the first to discover the hottest new videos or music online before everyone else, and want a place to share them and establish yourself as a sort of ‘talent scout’ that keeps an eye on the newest up-and-coming acts.
+ BrightKite
BrightKite is a location-based social networking site. Discover who visits your favorite places or see where your friends are and what they’re up to, in real time. When you post an update (basically, a snapshot of where you are), your location is marked on a Google map along with other users who have been to that location.
Facebook users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. What’s interesting about Facebook is that it focuses largely on the quality of existing relationships, as opposed to quantity or making new ones.
+ FriendFeed
FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. Think of it as an aggregator or listening post for all your friends who are on more than one social networking site.
+ Identi.ca
Identi.ca launched on July 1, 2008 and it’s basically an open-source version of Twitter licensed under the AGPL. As far as I can see, Identi.ca’s main advantage over Twitter is a more stable uptime due to lower subscriber numbers.
LinkedIn is an online network of more than 24 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries. It is founded on the idea that professional relationships are key to your professional success, allowing you to stay informed about your industry and to find the people you need to achieve your goals.
+ Mashable
Mashable is a social networking news site that ranks among one of the largest blogs on the internet. It reports on sites likeMySpace, YouTube, Bebo, Facebook, and Xanga, among a myriad of others, easily making it one of my go-to sites. “Social networking news” sounds incredibly vague, but it covers everything from the newest iPhone apps to how to find coupons online.
+ MySpace
MySpace is arguably the largest and most well-known social networking site, with 100+ million users. One of the arguments in the Facebook vs. MySpace debate sums up their positioning nicely: Facebook is all about the quality of existing relationships you have; MySpace is all for increasing the quantity of relationships you make.
+ Plurk
Plurk displays your updates on a timeline, allowing you to easily follow along. Plurk also has an interesting karma system in place, which lets users give karma to updates they enjoy and take karma away from updates they don’t. A user’s karma also goes down the longer they’ve been away from Plurk, which is an ingenious (and very devious) idea to keep users continually coming back.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (aka “tweets”) of up to 140 characters in length. It has attracted quite a large following, and is one of the most popular microblogging services to-date. Its explosive growth has strained the site’s resources, resulting in unexpected downtimes. Despite all this, many Twitter users remain loyal due to the strong feeling of community.
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July 26th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Considering that there are now so many social networks catering to such a wide range of niches, my biggest problem is finding ones relevant to me and related to my specific interests or product niches. Google seems to be inefficient and returns alot of irrelevant results. A good resource that I use to find them is this search engine for social networking sites.