The only one I've stayed with is LinkedIn.com. It has helped a couple of my friends find jobs and while I haven't taken one I have had a few job offers. I have also used it to reconnect with people I had lost track of.

Other than a few scattered stories of hookups and job opportunities, it doesn't seem like the social networking sites have actually made themselves that useful yet. Most people I knew signed up for Friendster, connected with everyone they knew, and then kind of stopped using it after a few weeks.

Same thing happened with Orkut. Orkut was a little more useful with its communities and discussion boards, but the interface was so awful that it was practically unusable.

Some day someone will create a social networking site that combines the best features of all the previous ones, and adds some killer new features. I'm thinking things like: Chat rooms, games, full-featured discussion groups, flickr-like picture galleries, last.fm-like music, book, and movie ratings/preferences.

I'm on a bunch of these because a lot of friends of mine are. It helps keep tabs on people you know. There are some people I like to check in on without having to call them and get stuck on the phone for two hours.

Meeting new people on them is almost entirely useless, in my opinion.

Also, a lot of people from elementary and high school have found me online, which is pretty awesome. And sometimes frightening.

I've signed up to practically every-damn-one out there, Orkut, Freindster, Linkedin, Soflow - you name it I can log in. I don't like any of them and only sign up because I always know someone who will invite me so.. what the hey. The only non-friend contacts I have gotten in any of them have
been strange chat-up lines or bizarre questions about why Scandinavian women don't marry (how the fuck should I know? I don't speak for all of them.) It seems a lot of them will have you fill in fifteen pages on your education and what you do, yet still only middle managers in banking from Illonois come and offer me a "great oppertunity". What the feck?

I think as long as the information is locked down within these sites, it's pretty useless. Like I cant grab it and have it in my hand held when I travel. If I could take it with me out on the web somehow, sorta like foaf, then it might get interesting. Foaf would have ruled the world had someone created a killer app/blog plugins for it a few years ago.

Social networking per se always had a solution-in-search-of-a-problem vibe. So the Friendsters and LinkedIns kinda got there and flopped on the beach a bit. Some that have come later have done much better at targeting specific communities and offering tools that suck people in: MySpace and FaceBook are probably the two top examples. At some level the practical value hasn't progressed much beyond LiveJournal, but these sites have mastered the outreach that gets people to them, and the stickiness that keeps people on them.

Social networking as a platform is alive and well, but less visible than these sites. Last.FM is one prominent example. The artist similarity engine that drives the whole thing depends on individuals building out their profiles. There are some rudimentary social features on top of that like Friending and Journaling, as well as Tagging. Flickr is certainly the top example of a functional site that makes the social networking part almost invisible. Digg is turning intoa worthy competitor to Slashdot, and inspiring sites with its look-and-feel but non-tech topics. The basic idea here is that you can aggregate peoples' preferences and find things -- either other people, or things those people like.

There's a ton of tiny webapps out there in the social space, too. Many of the hot Web 2.0 apps aren't just slick AJAX interfaces, they're multi-user collaborative spaces with more than a hint of Wiki in the plumbing. Basecamp/Backpack, Writely, online calendaring, wishlist hubs, it's a fantastically active area.

agro: My bet is that Yahoo! 360 is the first there, ocne they fully integrate del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming, and now Webjay. They're proving that they have a lot more experience in the product arena than Google, which spams out lots of research projects but doesn't seem interested or even necessarily working on integrating them or nursing them into killer apps.

Corante's Many to Many blog documents the space, so read that if you're interested in the nuts and bolts aspects or what's new and what's working.

I'm on all of them- but agropyron is correct, most people start using them and then peter out. Especially because some of the interfaces are AWFUL- MySpace is so user-unfriendly it's obscene.

Think about delivering your key demographic information to spammers, in exchange for the use of e-mail. That's what social networking is - duplicate existing web technologies within a site where there's advertising. This is why MySpace sold for half a billion. They built a large, qualified list of choice demographics and offered tons of ad impressions.

The other thing the MySpace sale shows us is that building a good app is not nearly as important as building a good clique. The next generation social networking platforms will spend more of their efforts on "seeding" the community than on app development.

The other thing the MySpace sale shows us is that building a good app is not nearly as important as building a good clique.

Exactly. That site makes me want to throw up my hands everytime I use it, but nobody cares about that. They only care that everyone they know is on it.

Corante's Many to Many blog documents the space

Also, check out: Centrality, Connectedness, Social Software Weblog, Technology For Communities and Virtual Handshake.

some of the interfaces are AWFUL- MySpace is so user-unfriendly it's obscene

There's a theory that some design is deliberately cheap. See: Wal-Mart, Radio Shack and their Realistic brand, etc. I believe this applies to MySpace.

If it were web-standard CSS and Ajaxed with every page vetted by 37signals AND Adaptive Path, the site would be a social failure.

For future reference: MySpace: Is 'ghetto' a design choice?