The TOP 15 most important social networking sites.

The following list are the most important social networking sites as of today. The list are not based on the popularity of the sites nor how old the website is running. This is based on its importance to people's lives, self improvement, business, friendship, and how we live our lives.

• Facebook - Initially intended for college students, then branched out by invite, and continuously growing with over 500 million members.
• Twitter - A free social networking service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts that are up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific. The site has become very popular in only a few months with over 75 million members.
• MySpace - Over 130 million members. this site is massive, boasting the largest membership of any social networking site on the internet.
• Linkedin - Over 75 million members. a powerful for business networking. mainly used by businessmen and organizations.
• Foursquare - Foursquare is a social networking site build by Google that shares your global location by checking in, sending shout out, and even promote the location by leaving tips.
• Friendster - It was considered the top online social networking service until it was overtaken by MySpace at around April 2004. Demographic studies shows that users are between 17 to 30 years of age and over 90 million members.
• StumbleUpon - Boasting over 13 million users, StumbleUpon is a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate web pages, photos, videos, and news article. We usually see this plugin on social bookmarking tools like addThis, shareThis, etc.. A great way to promote websites. It was bought by eBay for $75 million in May 2007.
• Delicious - The website delicious which is formerly known as "del.icio.us" is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in late 2003, and is now part of Yahoo!
• Digg - Digg is a website made for people to share and discover content on the internet by submitting links and stories, then people votes and comments on submitted contents in a social and democratic spirit.
• Orkut - Orkut is an Internet social networking service run by Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Now has a membership of 100 million.
• Classmates - Over 50 million members. One of the oldest social networking sites around, Classmates was kicked off in 1995, and has proven to be a great way for members to to connect with old friends and acquaintances from throughout their lives.
• Meetup - Over 2 million members. Meetup.com is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies.
• Yahoo! Pulse - Formerly known as Yahoo! 360° (a.k.a Yahoo! Days) is a personal communication portal similar to Orkut and MySpace -- it is now launched for public used already. It integrates features of social networking, blogging and photo sharing sites.
• Xanga - Over 27 million members. Xanga the blogging community is a free Web-based service that hosts weblogs, photoblogs, videoblogs, audioblogs, and social networking profiles.
• Care2 - Over 14 million members. Care2 is a social networking website that was founded to help connect activists from around the world.

In all, there are over 100 social networking sites on the Internet. Some of the other social networking sites that I have not included in the list above are:

Ryze, Bebo, BlackPlanet.com, Flickr.com, Reunion.com, aSmallWorld, Bebo, BlackPlanet.com, Blue Dot, Bolt, Broadcaster.com, Buzznet, CarDomain, Consumating, Couchsurfing, Cyworld, Dandelife, DeadJournal, DontStayIn, Doostang, Ecademy, eSPIN, Faceparty, Flirtomatic, Fotki, Friends Reunited, Gaia Online, Geni.com, GoPets, Graduates.com, Grono.net, Hyves, imeem, Infield Parking, IRC-Galleria, iWiW, Joga, Bonito, Last.fm, LibraryThing, LiveJournal, LunarStorm, MEETin, MiGente.com, Mixi, MOG, Multiply, My Opera Community, myYearbook, Netlog, Nexopia, OUTeverywhere, Passado, Piczo, Playahead, ProfileHeaven, Pownce, RateItAll, Searchles, Sconex, Shelfari, Soundpedia, Sportsvite, Studivz, TagWorld, TakingITGlobal, The Doll Palace, The Student Center, Threadless, TravBuddy.com, Travellerspoint, Tribe.net, Vampire Freaks, Vox, WAYN, WebBiographies, Windows Live Spaces, Woophy, XING, Xuqa, Yelp, Zaadz, Zooomr

The best social bookmarking widget now a days..

Social bookmarking widgets have really helped reduce clutter on web pages.

Not long ago, it was not uncommon to find bloggers putting a dozen different icons under their blog posts hoping that people would click these buttons to spread their content on the web. But as the number of social sites grew on the Internet, these numerous buttons were replaced with all-in-one widgets that not only offered more features but were easy to maintain as well.

share icon The idea is that instead of confusing your site visitors with icons of 16 different social bookmarking sites, you show them a single Share icon and they can choose the social service they want to use to save, share or bookmark your content.

Which Social Bookmarking & Sharing widget is right for your site?

The three most popular social bookmarking and sharing widgets on Internet are from Share This, Add This and Add to Any. Another service that’s relatively new but worth a mention is Tell a Friend.

Before we actually compare the features of these services, take a look at the graphic above to get some idea about the appearance of these widgets. Or you may visit this dummy page and try out any of these social sharing services.
AddThis.com

AddThis gives you complete control over the appearance and layout of the widget. You can arrange the icons in a single vertical column or put them in a horizontal strip or, if you are comfortable with CSS, you can even go for more complex hover animations.

In addition to sharing your web pages on social networks, your site visitors can also use the AddThis widget to print content or for adding the page to their browser bookmarks.

AddThis provides several analytics reports so you know what content is getting shared and what social services are most popular among your visitors. And there’s an option to add your brand name to the widget as well.

Almost every US government website (include the Whitehouse blog) uses AddThis for social sharing.
ShareThis.com

One of the unique points about the ShareThis widget is that remembers what you share. That means if you vote for a story on Digg or share a link on Twitter or stumble some page, the service will auto-save a log of all this activity into your ShareThis account. The sharing widget is available as a bookmarklet as well and this is handy for browsers like Google Chrome that don’t support add-ons.

On the publisher side, ShareThis is the only service that will allow you site visitors to share content through SMS text messages in addition to email and AIM. Though the default look of the ShareThis widget cannot be changed, you can choose which social services should be available inside the widget and their display order.

Like AddThis, ShareThis too provides detailed analytics so you can find out what people are sharing and how.
AddToAny.com

There are at least 50 different social networks and bookmarking websites on the Internet so how do you decide services that should be included in the sharing widget on your website? For instance, delicious is the most popular bookmarking service but some of your visitors could also be using Diigo or Mister-Wong so what do you do in this case? Show them both or toss a coin and pick one?

Well, the AddToAny button provides an excellent solution to this very problem. The service automatically detects social services that your visitors use and places them first in the widget. The detection mechanism is pretty good and I guess it does this by reading the browser history of visitors.

Another advantage of AddToAny is that it automatically uses your Google Analytics account for reporting. That means if you have the Google Analytics code on a page that also uses the Add To Any widget, the sharing statistics of that page will be collected just like your other Analytics data.

The layout of the Add To Any widget isn’t customizable though advanced users can hide individual tabs or even change the color scheme using CSS hacks.
Tell-A-Friend.com

With Tell-a-Friend, your site visitors can share your content with their IM buddies on Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL and MSN/Windows Live Messenger. You can rearrange the tab order in the widget and also choose which social services should be part of the individual tabs. The service also offers a paid option incase you like to brand the widget and email message with a custom logo.

For some reason, the TAF widget on the dummy page isn’t working in IE 8 or Firefox 3.5 but I used the one on NDTV.com and their email sharing feature is pretty impressive.

Conclusion:

All the services discussed above have something unique to offer. Here’s what I would suggest:

If you are looking to customize the widget heavily or plan to use your own social bookmarking icons so that the widget on your site looks a bit different from the rest, AddThis is a perfect choice.

If you want to offer readers an option to share content via text messages or need a widget that is extremely easy to setup and also looks elegant, go with ShareThis.

The Add To Any widget is again a good choice because site visitors get to see the service they frequently use right on top but the email sharing feature in this widget will open in another window.

Tell-A-Friend is the only service that offers sharing via popular instant messaging clients, the widget also includes a rich HTML email client so visitors can add notes to their shares but the free version of TAF doesn’t offer analytics and the widget UI can be a bit confusing for new users.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/sharing-widgets-for-websites/9249/