Best Social Sites

It used to be that in order to meet people and hang out with the people you already know, you went to a club, or a gathering place, or something.  I don’t even know, because I barely remember those times.  They are but a brief blip on my social radar.  Yours too, most likely, because we’ve all been swept up in the World of Social Networking.  Here are some of the sites that will keep you connected with all your in-personal and virtually all virtual friends:

Facebook

Well, duh.  Practically EVERYONE is on Facebook.  That’s why I put it first.  Because it is, technically, first.  I’m not necessarily listing all the others in order of popularity, but I am starting with the big dog, because it’s not like putting it at the end of the post is going to make you salivate with anticipation, right?  So.  Facebook.  It launched in 2004 – starting out as Mark Zuckerberg’s social Harvard experiment.  Now?  It is the most used social networking site.  Usage increased 188% from 2006 to 2007, 87% from 2007 to 2008, 186% from 2008 to 2009, and 38% from 2009 to 2010.   I can’t help but think that the decline in new users is attributed to the fact that EVERYBODY is now on Facebook.  Everybody.
>>Facebook – facebook.com

Bebo

Facebook, meet the site you killed.  Bebo used to be a wildly popular social networking site.  So popular, in fact, that 3 years after its 2005 launch it was bought by AOL for $850 million dollars.  Then, Facebook got more popular, and Bebo lost favor with us fickle social networkers.  AOL, stuck with some serious buyer’s remorse, announced that it would be selling (or shutting down, whichever) around April of 2010.  Along came a hedge fund group called Criterion Capital Partners and the sale was finalized in June of the same year.  The amount they bought it for?  It was not disclosed.  But analysts figure it was less than $10 million.  Sad, huh?  I guess “blog early, blog often” is not as good of a tagline as…what IS Facebook’s tagline, anyway?  What will be the fate of Bebo?
>>Poor Bebo – bebo.com

Zorpia

An article I read called Zorpia.com “the largest social networking site you’ve never heard of.”  It has tons of international users, but to have the “Royal” membership you have to pay.  Which means it’s not as popular as one of the free sites.  One cool fact – the site was founded in 2003 by one Jeffrey Ng, who was a tender 15 years old in 2003 and is now the CEO of the company.  So, he’s a 22-year-old CEO.  That’s pretty neat.
>>Hong-Kong based social networking site – zorpia.com

MySpace

Remember MySpace?  Man, was that popular!  Turns out it still is, to a certain degree.  While the site reached its height of popularity in 2006 after a 2003 launch (ousting Friendster as a favorite for social media-savvy people), it still gets plenty of use.  It’s a great place to find up-and-coming bands, and if you’re feeling creative, it still has the most customizable profiles of any other social networking site.
>>MySpace It Up – myspace.com

Orkut

Yeah, I’d never heard of it either.  Orkut is a social networking site owned by Google and named after the developer who created it.  His first name is Orkut.  I don’t know the keyboard codes to create the characters needed to tell you his last name, but he has a wicked cool personal website that you should look up.  He’s from Turkey.  Orkut, the website, is huge in India (responsible for 20.02% of total users) and huger in Brazil (51.09% of users).  So, if you want to meet people from India or Brazil, I strongly suggest you sign up for Orkut.
>>Huge in India and Brazil – orkut.com

Twitter

Twitter is the 15th most visited website of all the websites on the internet.  The spill-your-guts-in-140-characters-or-less microblogging site was created in 2006 and has grown by leaps and bounds since then.  Wikipedia tells me that the following is true:  in 2007 there were 400,000 recorded tweets per quarter.  In 2008 there were 100 million tweets per quarter.  In 2009 there were 2 BILLION tweets per quarter, and in the first quarter of 2010 there were 4 billion tweets.  Come June, there are a whopping 65 million tweets per day, which comes out to about 750 tweets per second.  Or, TPS.
>>TPS Reports – Twitter.com