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Pure Social Networking sites have changed the way a whole generation communicates with each other. The myspace / facebook phenomenon has created platforms to share text, images and media with simple interfaces and little to no knowledge of web development. We aren't huge fans of MySpace taking back web design to the days of Geocity and free Angel Fire sites, but you have to credit them as one of the first players to embrace the growth in social networking and scale accordingly. I believe that social networking tools will eventually make their way into most successful sites and an aggregator will be necessary to track all of the niche sites that have already began popping up. Look up Google's OpenSocial project for their idea of the future of social networking. We are really interested in hearing your thoughts aswell, so please feel free to use the Comment Link below or click any of the logo's to launch the sites you belong to or want to check out.
MySpace.com is the largest Social Network in the world based on traffic statistics from Alexa. This statistic might be misleading due to poor site architecture that leads to increased traffic results (note if you are an advertiser - this inflates their page views for advertising cpc impressions while reducing conversion rates). In an attempt to curb poorly designed profiles, css errors and server over loading, myspace recently added site themes that significantly clean up profiles. The site provides tools for personalized profile pages and has a host of third party widgets that can be added to improve your profile pages. Blog, share videos, share inages, promote music and more. Facebook.com is a quickly growing social utility founded by current CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. The site was initially created as a way for his Harvard classmates to keep in contact, but quickly grew as he released access to other Ivy League students. When facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it became the fastest growing Social Networking site in North America. Key to continued success, the facebook platform allows for third party developers to create widgets that add functionality to profiles and to the site in general. Valued at over $15,000,000,000 (thats alot of zero's) Facebook is still trying to figure out the best way to monetize their traffic and loyal customer base.
Orkut.com is Google's contribution to social networking. Originally founded in 2004 as a membership-invite only service, Orkut has grown to a user base of over 120 million (second only to Myspace). Although the site was developed for a North American audience, Most users come from South America and India. The site has all the social networking tools one would expect, but also hosts 50,000,000 community groups. Orkut is also Googles tie into Social Networking while they develop their OpenSocial initiaitve.
Bebo.com was started in 2005 by a the husband and wife team behind birthdayalarm.com - no doubt leveraging their experience building a large database of users. They sold www.bebo.com to AOL for $850 million dollars in 2006 and have since grown to the largest social networking site in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. Bebo's audience and site deisgn has grown up over the past year and will probably continue to mature with their teenaged key user demographics.
Ning.com is a Social Networking platform that lets you create your own communities while managing features, users and groups contained within. This is outstanding software allowing you to get a basic community up in 5 minutes for FREE! More advanced design customizations can be completed through templates or CSS edits or by producing a hybrid Ning / Standalone site. Ning was created by industry heavyweights (including the former founder of netscape) and has raised over $100 million dollars to continue growth.
Date.com is an very successful paid dating site in North America and Europe. Since 1997, Date.com has evolved into one of the leading dating portals through quality software and a large user database. Date.com is a paid service, but you can browse profiles for free when you sign up. Date.com ranks highly for real profiles and high quality match-ups and has shown strong growth through 2007-2008.
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is a website based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This site was developed by GrunMedia and maintained by Kyle Gruen. This site is both a Web 2.0 blog site and a chance to allow users the opportunity to vote on their favorite Social Networking sites. SocioMash.com has a few goals that we will strive towards as the site evolves:
:: social
