"Checking out some social networking sites"

Myspace is one of the 2 major competitors from these networking sites alongside facebook. Myspace is better with music and video capability is gained much of its popularity over the other networking sites due to this reason. *"Nitin Gupta, an analyst with The Yankee Group in Boston states that this site is rooted more towards radio, music and television and is used by many bands to gain a greater fan base ". This is probably its greatest advantage over its competition as the other sites aren't targeted at the music industry and music networking. I personally don't like myspace because its a little complicated to set up, as it requires you to use skins and other types of codes. I also find it to be targeted to an adolescent audience, rather than an adult one as most of the user profiles are provocative, excessive and immature.

Facebook is also one of the top competitors from these networking sites. I use facebook daily and find it to be the most entertaining and appropriate out of all these sites. I like its privacy settings, its layout and its professionalism. Almost everyone I know is my friend on facebook, even my childhood friends that I had lost total contact with are now easily reachable.

Orkut, which was created in 2004 by google is little known in the United States but is widely popular in Brazil., where 70% of its users are based. For this reason this site isn't very popular as most people americans have orkut accounts, so it is useless to have one unless you have a lot of friends that live abroad.

Friendster is very useful for meeting people with similar interests to you. You first must know someone in order to be accepted into the group, very much like in real life. Just like when you go out to a bar and you approach someone with the intention of becoming their friend, thus risking rejection. It isn't as popular as the other sites as most people either have facebook or myspace accounts.


*http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article