Art inspired me to capture a survey of systems I've come across :)

People-centric

  1. facebook - primary network with roots with college alumni/alumnae. setting aside concerns some of you have voiced, I think it works and does what its supposed to do well.
  2. linkedin - primarily a professional network and works great for business connections
  3. Pulse - thrown at me through Plaxo (which got acquired by Comcast the other day) - has promise but I'm not so sure with the media giant acquisition.
  4. Ryze - fell off the way side for me (ie. not active) I will ack it for being the first network that was intentional about creating face-to-face events. It was way ahead of its time!
  5. Ning - I have yet to evaluate. looks promising at the development level.
  6. Orkut - I poked around - facebook stuck more. I do believe Google will evolve it in the right direction with OpenSocial (not active)
  7. hi5 - college classmate was part of this startup. I didn't think it evolved quickly enough (not active)
  8. Friendster - played around with it - never stuck (not active)
  9. MySpace - set up a profile - didn't like all the "noise" and messy profiles (occasionally active - people pull me in every so often)
  10. CouchSurfing.com - great hospitality network. has a great verification, recommendation, and vouching system
  11. tribe.net - appears to be the home of many burners.
    • demoed my profile its ability to aggregate data from various sources (LiveJournal, Flickr, etc.) - funny enough it looks like my profile is frozen in time - it looks the same as it did in 2006! (there looks to be a bug in the auto-import of RSS entries)

Alternatives

other "objects" are the center of these networks...
  1. bookmarks - del.ic.ious - social networking through bookmarking - starting to use it to enable "mobile bookmarking" - has some great categorization infrastructure.
  2. photos - Flickr - great network for the photographer in you. very flexible options and features cater to how a photographer would like to classify, comment, and group photos! I only think the paid premium option is practical (not active)
  3. songs - last.fm - social networking through music. I think this has promise esp with the iTunes plug-in. concept at this point (not active)
  4. videos - YouTube - I don't think i Have to explain much here. I haven't really gotten into the "networking" aspect of it. I believe Google has a lot of promise in bringing this to the next level and supporting teams of people - supporting the independent film-maker in all of us!
  5. wikis - wikispaces - I love how they have executed this vision here - it's hard to explain - just do it!
  6. events - meetup.com - this site does quite well globally. it has a good business model (ie. costs money for the organizer to have a great tool) and encourage people to "self-round" themselves up until an organizer steps up and puts an event together!