Check Out Social Networking Sites

Facebook, Myspace and Friendster are all great social networking sites. They have features like sending messages to friends/people, events, people you may know, friend requests, newsfeeds/status updates from friends, people in your network, etc.

Of course, Facebook is the most popular among these three sites. I feel this is in part to all the features that it pioneered. While Myspace and Friendster now has a lot of these features, Facebook set the pace for the sites.

It gained popularity by creating a truly emersive, fun, social website for people to converge and communicate with eachother. Features like chatting and games became popular with its members. Although Myspace and Friendster initially had games and applications, Facebook games tend to be more collaborative, where you can send these virtual items to friends, in many of these games/apps. Facebook also built on Myspace's status update feature by allowing members to post embedded video links (i.e. YouTube) and pictures into their status updates. Although all three allow members to control their privacy options, my Myspace profile turned into a marketing bullseye. This is why I eventually deleted my profile and just kept my Facebook profile - it was more controlled, and limited truly to just my friends.

But social networking isn't limited to just friends and your social life. Websites like Linked In help professionals network within and outside of their industry. There are standard features like those you would find in the other popular social networking sites; messages, invitations, People You May Know, Who's Viewed My Profile, and Your Network. However, there are features not found on the other sites, tailored specifically to the needs of professionals. Some of these interesting and helpful features include Jobs You May Be Interested In, Reading List by Amazon (which includes Your Reading List, Network Updates, Industry Updates) and Ads by Linked In Members. These features help professionals stay on top of important events, publishings, etc related to their field, by giving them a snapshot of what their peers in the industry (and outside of the industry) are currently doing.