When internet consultant Giovanni Gallucci first joined the professional networking site LinkedIn two years ago, he felt like a pioneer. Now he’s one of millions.
”I figured I was cutting edge, but now everyone’s doing it,” says the expert on social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace.
Gallucci (31) is the publisher of Socialtrackr.com, a guide to the community sites that are becoming almost as popular as porn.
According to figures from Hitwise, a firm that studies internet trends, net communities and porn both accounted for about 10,8% of all pages viewed online in March this year, as online networks added users and porn sites lost them.
Still not impressed? Try looking at it this way: the 10 biggest social networking sites had more than 200-million visitors in March. Together, their users blogged, tagged, uploaded, messaged and viewed a staggering 34-billion individual web pages.
Numbers like these show that social networking sites have reached far beyond the high-school playground and college campus.
”I know there are a lot of teens on MySpace and they seem to be taking over the web lately, but it’s not just the teens, believe me,” says Linda Roeder, the personal web-pages guide for About.com. ”A big part of anything on the web is the older crowd. The parents, the sci-fi crowd, the TV and movie fans. Most of them are twentysomething, thirtysomething, and older.”
Attraction
So what’s the big attraction? You don’t have to be a compulsive blogger or rabid exhibitionist to take advantage of these sites. Actually, if you know how to turn on a computer, have at least one interest in life and are vaguely tolerant of interacting with other people, there’s a site out their with your name on it.
”There’s a social network for literally every single niche,” says Steve O’Hear, who writes a blog on social networking for tech website ZDNet.
The experts agree that there are just three things for which people really join these easy-to-use sites: to pursue a hobby, to connect with friends or to rediscover old friends.
MySpace still dominates with 55-million members who surf through user-submitted networks of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. But MySpace has its drawbacks. It skews to a younger demographic and its sheer size can make you feel like a lonely country bumpkin plopped down in the centre of New York City.
Facebook seems more mature. It’s easier than MySpace to be selective about whom you interact with and is growing much faster than MySpace in the United States and South Africa.
Something for everyone
The well-known social media sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Digg allow people to interact through photos, videos and news stories.
Last.fm links music lovers up with others of similar taste and produces personalised radio stations. LibraryThing allows users to share reading lists and other information on books. Flixster is for movie lovers, Catster and Dogster are for pet lovers, and LinkedIn is for corporate contact lovers who use personal references and friends of friends to try to get ahead in business.
Every day sees a new social-networking site catering to a niche that you would never imagine existed. Neighborrow invites you to loan stuff to people in your neighbourhood, Videomodelpics enhances the community of beautiful people, and EveningExchange is one of those sites where teenagers are certainly not welcome.
Many of these sites will no longer exist a few years down the road, but the genre is here to stay thanks to its ability to link people with other like-minded individuals. It’s also spreading from computers to cellphones and becoming the default method of communication for the networked generation.
”Soon everyone will be communicating via open services,” says Gallucci. ”You click on someone’s profile and send them a message. Social networking is the email of the future.” — Sapa-dpa