Unit Structures: Social Networking: Five Sites You Need to Know

Social Networking: Five Sites You Need to Know
Posted 6/14/2006 09:49:00 AM |

In preparation for some upcoming research, I've been surveying the field of Social Networking sites. The only way to characterize growth in the field is explosive; while I don't have actual numbers on how many social networking sites are out there, my informal survey shows we are talking at least hundreds, with more coming online each day. In the span of a year, social networking has proliferated - hundreds of millions of users have accounts on SNS-enabled sites. Indeed, social networking is now "just another feature" of many sites - we're coming to expect sites to be SNS-enabled.

At this point, you're probably familiar with the major SNS players - MySpace, Facebook, Classmates.com, even Friendster - as there are hundreds of emergent SNS players, what are sites you need to pay attention to? Here's my annotated list:

The Future of Social: Cyworld
With over 20 Million daily users, this South Korean social network is emerging as a strong model for the future of social networks. According to press citations linked from Wikipedia, over 25 percent of the South Korean polulation has a Cyworld account, with up to 90 percent of South Koreans in their 20's having an account. Cyworld is truly cutting edge; participants in this game-like social network can micropay for clothes, furniture and accessories. Karmic elements - knowing what the "world" thinks about you - keep people coming back. Speaking to users of the service, it is clear that Cyworld is nothing short of a phenomenon. We stand to learn alot from their success.

Taking on MySpace: Bebo
While US-Based, Bebo has found a strong international audience, particularly in the UK. Bebo is an open, non-niche network, built on similar concepts as MySpace. Indeed, the market can't support many of these, but Bebo has found validity in sheer numbers. If your social network can find an audience - particularly one that will market on your behalf, users will come. With 22M registered users, Bebo is an emergent force - one that stands to make significant inroads on this side of the pond.

Social Networking on the Subcontinent: Hi5
With over 40M users, Hi5 is the prominent SNS brand in India. Indeed, as India is a tech center, this brand reaches far beyond the Subcontinent - the site is increasingly popular in the EU, as users keep in touch with extended families. In a sense, Hi5 is a fairly pedestrian social network - but there's something absolutely important about being the brand that gently introduces social networking to a new community. If Hi5 can learn from the stumblings of Friendster, and appropriate the popular features of Myspace, this brand has a very promising future in a very interesting market.

Monetizing Social Networks: Faceparty
With 6M users, this long-established UK-based SNS service isn't as popular - indeed, Bebo and Myspace have cut deeply into Faceparty's market. Regardless, Faceparty is notable as an SNS that has monetized its user base. Faceparty sells things like advanced identity controls, the ability to see who is viewing your profile, advanced search, and filtering. This is a different approach from Cyworld, one that creates issues of trust in the system - however, there is much to be learned from Faceparty's successes and failures.

What Facebook Could Become: XuQa
Facebook takes a fairly conservative approach to college social networking. The features, the look and feel - even at its raciest, Facebook is actually a pretty tame place. That was always a smart move - many of Facebook's users had never used an SNS prior to signing on. However, as students become familiar with Facebook, and see its limitations in the context of Myspace - it stands that they may want to branch out. XuQa represents the other end of the spectrum in college networking - it is purposefully racy, full of game-like features - an anti-Facebook. With 1M registered users, XuQa represents approximately 1/7 of Facebook's userbase - but the comparison ~~isn't exactly~~ is fair, as ~~anyone can~~ only college students can have a XuQa account. (Updated July 1) XuQa is on to something here - making social networking a game-like experience actually brings people back (just look at Cyworld). I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook integrates like features.

Ok - so that's my list - let's put it in context. As social networking becomes normal, a number of interesting trends emerge - trends that will have lasting implications for designers of social-enabled tools. Here's a handy bulleted list:

Social networking is becoming content-centric. Essentially, companies are building social-enabled sites around content areas - be they cars, music or to-do lists. In this context, social networking adds the logical next layer to content-driven resources. This is an extremely important trend - in the future, all of our content sites will have SNS characteristics. Sites that move early and implement well could very easily steal a large audience pool from established content sites.
Social networking is the vanguard of micropayment. As we've seen in Second Life, people are absolutely willing to exchange real-life dollars for virtual accessories and karma. Users vest a good part of their identity into their chosen social sites, so monetization possibilities abound; letting users buy little things that make their virtual live better, or more rich makes these sites fun. Indeed, I think fun is they key part - people don't want to pay to use social networking sites, they want to pay to make their experience better. I believe we'll be seeing a lot more of this in the future.
Social networking for the sake of social networking just doesn't cut it. Put simply, we want more from SNS-enabled sites than association. If we're going to invest our time into a SNS site, make it worth our while. Make it a game, make it entertaining, make it useful - but don't expect us to come if you think its enough to browse our friends profiles.

If you're a subscriber to my blog, you've probably seen me hit these points before. In my opinion, these trends are really telling. Social networking is absolutely here to stay - this is not simply a "phenomenon". The young users of these tools are situating their entire formative internet experience around them - and the affects of this social learning will inform use patterns throughout their life. Looking at the five sites I've profiled, we can see this "phenomenon" is not bound by geography or culture or language - everyone is welcome to join a social networking website, and hundreds of millions of people have done so. Put in context, we're really only at the beginning of "social networking" - these five sites, along with the established giants, will shape the future of our online social networking experience.

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At June 15, 2006 12:03 AM, Kevin Farnham said...: Thanks for this list. I've thought about the relationship between social networking and online gaming. In the introduction to our MySpace book we say "In one sense, MySpace is a massive online role-playing game, probably the world's biggest." I've noticed that for many older adult users, this is especially true, with people "being" Einstein or a character from King Arthur's time.

I think with younger people, part of the "game" aspect of social networking, or part of why it's desirable for the social networking site to "feel" like a game, is because playing computer games has been part of life from the very beginning for them. Nintendo, PlayStation 2... Now XBox with the capability to have a game with people located somewhere else, either people you know or people you don't know. Gaming is a way of interacting with the world.

In many games, you interact with the virtual world typically by being a character in that world. In social networking, you are doing the same thing, you are playing a role, but it is a role that you create using the tools at hand. For example, your MySpace profile is a characterization of yourself. That's of course why the predators had such free rein initially. But aside from that, each individual creates a characterization that represents a "self" they would like to present or "be" within the context of the social networking world.

I can see how having greater capability to make that characterization of oneself, that "player", more mobile, with greater and more varied ability to interact with the surrounding virtual world and the other "characters" in the "game," would be very attractive to the participants.

One "flaw" of MySpace, I think, is that to revise your "character" you have to throw away what you had before. You can't swap out versions of your character. Sure, you can have multiple accounts, but what if you want to portray one characterization or mood of a character one day and a different characterization of the same character another day? It can't be done easily.

I'm not advocating multiple personalities, but multiple personifications of ourselves are something we do every day in real life, right? Depending on the situation, we act differently. Monster.com lets you have 5 different resumes, I think. Well, that's 5 different "versions" of presentations of yourself to potential employees, 5 different "characters" you are allowed to be.

From your post, it sounds like the game experience is being fused with social networking at some sites. It's going to be very interesting to watch it all unfold!
At June 16, 2006 1:19 AM, Rk said...: I guess you missed on Orkut which I guess is more popular than hi5 in India (may be even outside.)
At June 16, 2006 1:30 AM, Fred Stutzman said...: I'm not sure about that - if you look at Orkut's wikipedia page, you'll see that Orkut's main demos are Brazil and US (I've seen Orkut himself present those numbers, so I know they're good). At 16M users, it is quite a bit smaller than Hi5's 40M userbase, which is squarely rooted in India. Perhaps I misunderstood your comment?

Either way - I just wanted to shine some light on services that people (particularly people in the US) may not be familiar with. Orkut is pretty established, so I'm not sure covering it would have added much.
At June 16, 2006 9:17 AM, George Nimeh said...: So ... How's my favourite Tar Heel?

Used the "make it worth our while" quote in a meeting with a leading European telco today. Went over big time. Credited some Tar Heel PhD candidate. The one American at the table understood. The others looked at me like I was from another planet. I love London ...

Was reading a couple other posts on your blog. All quite interesting. You might want to check out: Visualizing the Social Network with regards to how blogs are the glue that keeps social networks stuck together - fits with your piece on Collaborative Reference Work. Also of note is MySpace Is The Most Expensive Data Mining Project Ever, a great post by Scott Karp.

~G~
At June 16, 2006 11:04 AM, Jason said...: My my...you've been popular'ed on del.icio.us!

:-)
At June 16, 2006 12:38 PM, Ike said...: >Social networking is becoming content-centric
>Social networking for the sake of social networking just doesn't cut it.

I totally agree and I'm surprised you didn't list Travel as a key area for social network. Check out TripConnect, a social networking site in Travel. In addition to posting/reading reviews on destinations and hotels, you can join and build up a network of travel friends and join travel related groups. Once you have a network, you can find friends and group members that have been to destinations that you want to travel to and ask them for detailed travel advice. For example, you could join Family Travels, Budget Travelers, or the Food and Restaurants Travel Enthusiasts to start your network

No more anonymous travel advice. Get it from your friends and people that you share common interests.
At June 17, 2006 4:17 AM, Rk said...: Ok...you might be right..i dont know the numbers or facts. AFAIK, people I know are in orkut but not in hi5. My ignorance.
At June 23, 2006 3:18 PM, Jack Faris said...: Very good points, Fred - well researched. I'm in the online media space, and I came across Panjea.com - though they just launched, I would place my bet that these guys take first place in this whole sector. It's a bold claim for a site which just came out, but they're the first (out of the hunderds like you mentioned) who I see as actually getting the full potential, and integrating it from both a functionality and design standpoint.

They give 50% of the ad revenue back to members, allow users to sell their songs & videos directly from the media player AND set pricing. Also, users can share playlists (no one I know does this) and start their own TV & Radio stations - in the most advanced media player in the industry.

Check it out - www.panjea.com , I'd like to hear your thoughts on it as an expert in the space.

Cheers,
Jack Faris
At June 23, 2006 4:43 PM, shawn shahavi said...: hey jack i checked out panjea.com.... i think ur right - this site rocks!! where did you find it? this is PERFECT for musicians....
At June 23, 2006 4:48 PM, Fred Stutzman said...: This is starting to feel spammy. I may delete the previous two posts.
At June 27, 2006 5:30 PM, Anonymous said...: Have just checked all comments above and all seem to just having some European element addition to their platforms,if even so. Few only incorporate a pure European based platform (yes opening the borders in cyberspace is understood...).

However, another addition to the fast growing European social networking web 2.0 sphere based on travel and city entertainment is www.citytherapy.com, where European city people can create their profile and be connected to their favourite places and events in Europe. Dynamic Time Out situations where you can find which people with which interests are hanging out in Europe.
At July 01, 2006 8:10 AM, Xuqa's Kat said...: In the event that link did not work, here's the Physical Data:

Humans vs. robots: the machines will destroy us
Chase Gilbert
Issue date: 6/28/06 Section: Opinions
At July 26, 2006 6:20 AM, millssteven said...: Fred
Do you have any thoughts on how business / e-commerce can benefit from the SNS phenomenon?
Do you think there's a way that businesses can run SNS sites and add value to the community without there being an anti-corporate backlash?
Be interested to hear your views...
At July 30, 2006 11:08 AM, soma said...: There are already companies benefiting. F-Secure, an antivirus software company, has been running their own blog since 2004. Obviously a company like that, which is very dependant on time and information, stands to gain much from the SNS concept as a business practice. There are other companies of all types that I've run across doing the same thing. It's ironic that communication is so essential in the business world and it seems that one effective way to get everyone to communicate is to encourage them to get to know you via CRT, CPU, & LAN. :) Nevertheless, a company like F-Secure is based on the other side of the planet and without this blog I probably would have never known what they even looked like (or that most of their workforce is NOT Indian outsourced labor) Looks a lot like my IT team in fact.....you see? Already....the company has personality with me, which for me and quite a few people on this planet, that will easily make the difference between choosing one or the other product. Anyway, I'm getting off my point a little so I better cut out of here..I guess I am pretty interested in a lot of philisophical thought that is provoked from the concept of SNS bringing us all together....See, now I feel like I got my 2 cents in the conversation and if it was real life, my roommate wouldn't have shut up long enough for me to even speak :) So now I will go away with the satisfaction of feeling like I got to voice my opinion to an audience who is interested in what I have to say...maybe that's part of the lure of personal blogs as well. If there's a game about these things it really with yourself and your perception of who you think is listening (for me, I know that no one is) heh...With the fear of sounding "spammy" I'm going to give you the link to F-Secure thing....I don't work for them or even use their software soooo...not marketing anything :) I was thinking I'd just skip the link and tell you to google it but hey, what's the convenience of posting my .02 if I can't make it convenient for you. Peace

Let's not forget WikiPedia.....now that's somewhat of the same SNS style or could very well be and wow, what an awesome thing Wiki is....not quite the same type of thing as the (mostly) unregulated Myspace type sites but obviously any time vast amounts of informaiton and collaboration mix, it is going to be something meaningful

F-Secure's Blog site
At August 01, 2006 9:20 AM, David Cruickshank said...: Social networks are launching every day it seems. I'm not sure there are hundreds - morel likely thousands. Great post. Here are my thoughts on the plethora of SNS out there...

http://internet-biz.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-many-social-networks-is-enough.html
At August 01, 2006 9:14 PM, Anonymous said...: Great post. Just wondering where you were getting your registered users numbers though.

Question: Does Hi5 have 40 million users total or 40 million in India? Where is that stat coming from? When I searched by country on Hi5, to proxy how many users there are in India, I got only 1.2 million results.

Same with Bebo? 22 million total or 22 million in the UK

And Faceparty?
At August 02, 2006 9:45 AM, Fred Stutzman said...: All of the stats are aggregate, and they come from the site directly or from media reports. The hi5 stat comes from www.hi5networks.com.
At August 04, 2006 2:00 PM, Michael Muller said...: Funny... these SNS are very much like the BBS of the 1980's and early 1990's, but with the power that the web brings (and of course the ease, and the adoption now being almost complete).

If I recall some of the top off the shelf BBS systems back then were PC Board, Wildcat, Galacticomm and TBBS (which I ran on mine).

What's coming next to the web are the out-of-the-box platforms for smaller companies to add SNS to their business sites without having to host it through an aggregator or larger entity (ie; YahooGroups). You already have Drupal and a bunch of free LAMP-based applications, both hosted and DIY. I'm working on my own as a hosted solution and a turn-key. This is indeed the future.

Michael
At September 24, 2006 4:43 PM, Anonymous said...: I used to go on SMS.AC which is a very crappy website. I have totally abandoned it. They will take all your passwords and pam your friends. Also they loose the photos you upload. sometimes the comments reach the destined sometimes not...and they change the website so often already their website is so complex and by the time you get used to it they change it. Also it is too crowded. I havent used all the social networking websites but i believe SMS.AC is the crappiest and ugliest of all.

Oh yeah one more thing the unwanted sms you get and you ahve to pay for them.
Seriously one of the crappiest website.. wonder if they are bunch of engineers who do not how to make a presentable product
At October 17, 2006 6:00 AM, amitize.com - worldwide friendship said...: Great article about the five sites, but please don't forget the popular worldwide social networking / online community website: http://www.amitize.com
At December 09, 2006 9:59 PM, Anonymous said...: region centric portal's like www.cyword.com,www.mixi.com, and www.indyarocks.com are sure to benfit from localization concept.
whats really intresting about the region centric social networking sites is that they have an option to offer what an individual really wants from a socialnetworking site
At February 11, 2007 1:41 PM, Anonymous said...: Here is another example of web 2.0 based social networking. http://www.amicoz.com
At February 21, 2007 4:01 AM, Anonymous said...: There are some other great social networking sites out there than these 5 but for the most part this is a good list of social networking sites.
At April 01, 2007 3:04 PM, the pants situation said...: you might enjoy draugiem.lv, which represents 50% of the Latvian population.

draugiem.lv charges small amounts of money for little features, notably, storage space, the ability to see who has viewed your profile, and the ability to be "invisible" while looking through other's profiles.

draugiem has launched sites for most of the European languages but none have caught on and site remains dominantly Latvian.
At April 20, 2007 4:38 AM, RomBas said...: Social networking with travel mashup

With the advent of social networking concept, we see almost 10 new sites are being released to attract users. I doubt how many of them will exist in coming year. I have developed amicoz.com in such a way that it emphasizes more on a theme rather being a so called Make-A-Friend site. So I took steps to build travel based networking and map mashup where information can be shared among users in a nice way.

The site is under beta. I have planned to code itso that users dont have to type in where they want to go, rather their clicks will inform the system where they want to go.

I expect you to visit my efforts in amicoz.com and let me know your feedback.
At April 24, 2007 10:16 PM, RomBas said...: A generic social networking site cant make any good progress unless it has something special. Making friends online has becoming a boring topic now-a-day. Lets think about molecular social concept.
At May 16, 2007 4:42 AM, SNAPSHOTS said...: good post
but u skipped
orkut.com
probably
but it is hi end one in india and around....
At June 18, 2007 10:39 PM, Joseph said...: Just wanted to drop by and say hi.
When you get a chance, do visit my blog as well.

Joseph
ambatchmasterpublisher
At June 28, 2007 1:35 AM, Anonymous said...: Anyone can have a social site these days, I think if you really work hard and promote it well, It could take off, or you can only have 3000 user, but Google adsence would pay your beer tab lol!

Check out this Social Networking Script:
http://www.eziner.biz/social_networking_script/social_networking_script.html
At July 04, 2007 10:20 AM, Anonymous said...: WWW.CITYTHERAPY.COM: European social network for city travel. Share and find friends, places, events and trips!
At July 19, 2007 3:53 PM, Joseph said...: Either way - I just wanted to shine some light on services that people (particularly people in the US) may not be familiar with. Orkut is pretty established, so I'm not sure covering it would have added much...

Joseph
Resale Rights
Master Resale Right
At August 22, 2007 8:32 AM, Shahid Shah said...: web 2.0 India is Social Networking sites in India
How many people in india is using web 2.0 For business?
Well I can tell you they are many.
Orkut, no competition.
People using it for business, rather then just networking.

How they are using it?

Well if you are in orkut you must be knowing why?

Go and create one community, market it, invite people to join in.......
and grow your network.
At October 07, 2007 11:29 PM, Anonymous said...: You should add http://friendsite.com to the list! It's free, and a bit like facebook and myspace (groups and feeds like facebook and customizable profiles and your own url like myspace), and of course, its free to signup and use!
At October 21, 2007 5:35 PM, Anonymous said...: I agree... FriendSite.com is da bomb, it's much cleaner and clearer than facebook and you can still make it your own like myspace - love it!

Jenny
At December 03, 2007 10:33 PM, Sanjeev said...: Another one http://www.corners.in focusses on content rather than the old friends/blogs etc.

Sanjeev
At December 13, 2007 10:55 PM, Tom said...: Good post.
I've come across a new social networking website called Catchpals.com and I pretty much liked the functionalities there like, chat, articles, blogging, forum so you might wanna check that as well.
http://www.catchpals.com
At December 27, 2007 7:18 AM, Ranveer said...: Check Corners at http://www.corners.in - Has lot of content for the casual visitor, and if you sign-in you get more than a list of friends. I won't tell you more - try it out.
At December 27, 2007 11:03 PM, Anonymous said...: There are other popular SNS in india as well like bigadda.com, yaari.com, allindians.com, indyarocks.com and lot more are coming up.
At March 11, 2008 2:06 AM, Anonymous said...: what do you think of lymabean.com
At April 12, 2008 7:58 PM, Kevin Dodd said...: The key I think to all these new SNS's is to pick a niche and build on that. A lot of the big players are very broad in their target market so that leaves much room for more targeted niches to find their place. I Have a new SNS called DiscoverMeLive.com and it's focus is helping it's users monetize their content, talent, or special abilities. It looks like profit sharing with members is the way a lot of these existing and new
SNS's are heading. Power to the people.
At April 16, 2008 6:18 AM, Anonymous said...: you should consider this brand new network for cooking and food as well -> www.garlicoon.com - The Network for Good Food
At May 22, 2008 10:46 AM, Anonymous said...: does anyone know where I can get paid to network?
loucass@rock.com
At May 22, 2008 9:29 PM, Justin D. said...: I hope no one minds a plug by me for a project I'm currently working on. I'm currently in very early development stages for a social network, Collaboration Board. The purpose of the network is to allow business, professionals, groups, and individuals collaborate and network for commercial, educational, and cross-cultural collaboration.

In some respects the end product will be similar to LinkedIn. However, a different model will be used to not only facilitate networking but also place more emphasis on tools designed for business, group, and project collaboration and management.

At the moment, I would like to support the open source community as much as possible and I'm looking into using OpenMeetings to allow people to conference in their group networks. This isn't set in stone yet though, as I need to make sure the code can be easily adapted.

If anyone is interested please read about the Collaboration Board Vision visiting the link above. I have also started a development blog as well. In the blog I will be posting about obviously the development progress of the project and also about social networks, the industry, and their future in general.

For those interested I have a few links in my blog that you may be interested to note. One is a very readable and interesting article on Socially Translucent Systems. The other discusses the concept of a web 3.0 idea, the semantic web.

For the time being I am the only person working on the project but I hope to develop a strong following and want the community to play a large role in the Collaboration Board development process. I also may bring in community members directly to work on the project if the circumstances are right.

At the time of writing this I am not yet sure whether I plan to incorporate as a non-profit or as a for profit LLC. Regardless, I do hope to be able to release some - but not all - of the tools and algorithms we develop in-house as open source. Also, as much of the development will consist of open source software, I hope the blog will help spread the word to the public about different open-source projects, technologies, and their teams.
At August 05, 2008 3:00 AM, ViNZ said...: Thank you so much for such an excellent list of social sites you have provided. These are very useful in my SEO activities.
Keep it up!!!
Cheers!!!