It's the Social Network Hoedown!

There is a lot out there for social networkites. MySpace is still the leader in number of users, but I'm here to tell you about lesser known, but perhaps better options.

Everyone who would ever consider joining a social network at least knows of Facebook by now. Students have known about it and used it for the longest as it was originally open only to them. Now it's public and has enough users that Yahoo reportedly offered over a billion dollars for the site. The amazing thing is the offer was turned down. I suppose the Facebook founders are holding out for two billion, but I doubt that Facebook will become any more relevent than it is today-- meaning the next offer will no doubt be less.

The social networkites are fickle, you see. And new networks are popping up better than MySpace and Facebook. I just started toying with Virb.com, which has more in common with MySpace but is a whole lot prettier. It allows customizing the HTML and CSS code to make pages look like high-quality web 2.0 sites. Though even without the customization, pages look better than 90% of MySpace profiles.

A little outside the box are sites like Twitter and Jaiku, which are less profile page oriented. Twitter is more like the status option of facebook, or an away message. It is microblogging that answers the question "what are you doing right now?" Actually Twitter's creator was also the guy behind Blogger before Google bought it out. If you want to see how people use Twitter, try out twittervision.com.

Jaiku is different still, it displays your web presence. Visitors can see messages you add, similar to Twitter's microblogging, as well as feeds from other sites you use across the internet. My Jaiku page displays bookmarks to my favorite sites as I add them through del.ici.ous, as well as photos added to Flickr, and new postings to this very blog.

So now you know. Go check them out and be my friend!