Top Ten Social Networking Sites

So, the world is indeed becoming a global village, with you not having to leave your birthplace to know what is happening worldwide. I am talking about the internet, and with the internet come social networking sites. There are hundreds of these sites, but here we bring you the top ten sites that will get you connected, feeding your social cravings of attention, interaction, and connection with friends and total strangers.
 
10. Orkut

orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google Inc. The service is designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. As of July 2011, 58.1% of orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 32% and Japan with 2%.

9. Hi 5

hi5 is a social networking website based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanchi. One of the best features that they boast off is the legitimate friends that you could befriend.

Because of that, more and more people are actually being encouraged to join in and create their own accounts using the highly selective profile creation interphase. hi5 has many features common to social networking sites, such as friend networks, photo sharing, user groups, and status updates. Since the site’s redesign in 2009, hi5 has added a number of features oriented toward gaming and entertainment. The site features over 200 games in a variety of genres, and has been adding games at a rate of 2-3 per week.
 
8. Tagged

Tagged is a social networking site based in San Francisco, California, United States, founded in 2004. Tagged allows members to browse the profiles of other members, play games, and share tags and virtual gifts. Tagged says it has 100 million members. After registering a free account, Tagged users can customize their profile page, to which users can upload photos and albums, send and receive messages from other users, post a biography about themselves and their interests send virtual "winks" to each other, and post status updates to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions 

7. Multiply

Business people also have to communicate with each other every once in a while to exchange ideas and propose new forms of plans for their current settings. Now, multiply could do cater all of their needs when it comes to business. Aside from the free services that are offered here, you could also enjoy the friendly environment that is rather easy to learn and understand even for new members and beginners. The interphase is not really that sophisticated and it would only take some minutes for you to get the hand of rooming around the website.

6. Friendster

Friendster is a social gaming site focused on gaming and music based in Mountain View, California. It was previously known as a social networking website. Before the site was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via their profile and their network.

It was considered one of the original and even the "grandaddy" of social networks. Friendster was founded by computer programmer Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin in 2002 in Morgan Hill, California before the creation, launch and adoption of MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), and others. The name Friendster is a portmanteau of "friend" and Napster 

5. Ning

Ning is an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks, launched in October 2005. Ning offers customers the ability to create a community website with a customized appearance and feel, feature sets such as photos, videos, forums and blogs, and the service layers in support for "Like”, integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo! Ning, Inc., the operating company, has its headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

The service allows customers to charge for membership directly within their Ning Network. Customers can also monetize by using services provided through partnerships established by Ning, and adding display advertisements, such as Google AdSense, to their Ning Network.

There are over 90,000 (as of June 2011) social websites, known as Ning Networks, running on the Ning Platform. Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. In here, you could set up a very strong network of colleagues so that whenever you have to contact someone for a project, you can keep in touch with your network quite more easily. LinkedIn's CEO is Jeff Weiner, previously a Yahoo! Inc. executive. The company was founded by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal and Socialnet.com 

3. MySpace

Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors.

From 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States.

In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors
Generally; MySpace is still as user friendly as it used to be so there shouldn’t really be a lot of user related issue when it comes to this topic. The only problem about MySpace however is that it almost never changed its platforms in a large-scale manner therefore, making it looks like a bit uncompetitive compared to other social media.

2. Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS” of the Internet.

1.Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and Web site launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Facebook users must register before using the site.

The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the Web site.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

Source: Wikipedia, Internet shemmugisha@gmail.com