Submitted by keith on Sun, 2007-06-10 08:46
Social networking is becoming part and parcel of young people's lives these days. So, making friends isn't too difficult - but where do some people actually make new friends?
Below are a list of some popular sites where users can create accounts for free, and add other users to your account as friends.
Friendster - Founded by American entrepreneur Jonathan Abrams in 2002, this social-networking website has grown in strength since then. It has more than 44 million users to-date.
Features include blog hosting, space for 100 photos and ability to view network of friends on a patented "Six degrees of separation" web.
The FaceBook - Launched by a Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, and it is one of the fastest in gaining popularity among users. So far, it has approximately 24 million users.
Features include an inclusion of existing schools or communities to user's portfolio. In addition, users can configure visitors' access restriction to view photos.
MySpace - Founded by American Tom Anderson for its initial purpose to promote his band's music in 2003, but is now owned by Rupert Murdoch's New Corp. MySpace has the largest pool of users, among all social networking sites; approximately 183 million users.
Its features include latest update of movie and music releases, live chat rooms and even a huge library of user-uploaded videos.
Multiply - Launched in 2004 and based in Florida, it has roughly 4 million users.
Features include live chats and unlimited upload of photos and videos files.
Bebo - Based in San Francisco, California, Bebo is also another large social networking site - mainly in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. It is ranked third behind MySpace and Facebook in the United States. So far, it has more than 34 million users, and it was only launched in 2005.
Features is somewhat similar to that of MySpace and FaceBook. It allows users to upload photos and pictures and there is also a personal blogging facility.
Club Stomp - Just only one year old (see linked article), it is to be launched by Singapore Press Holdings on this Saturday.
Some of these features allow sending of greetings to friends via a rose, beer or a wink. The more "greetings" that a user received, the higher his or her popularity rating is. High popularity rated users will be featured on the Club Stomp front page.
On top of these specialised social-networking sites, there are also hundred of other companies that provide similar services, such as Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces.
Basically, these sites require user to have an email account in order to sign up. After which, user will has to set up their profile in the accounts, e.g. hobbies, interests and occupation.
It follows that, to add other users from both existing and new network. Some sites allow adding of users via emails, whereas other allow searching of users from browsing the archive list of account holders.
From then on, you start expanding your social network, and some day, you may end up having over ten of thousands of friends, as some users have already achieved this feat.
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