Specialized Social Networking
Hm. Apparently there are social networking sites aside from the ubiquitous Facebook and Myspace. These lesser sites, such as CarDomain, the Steam Community, and Flickr unite all their users under a common interest. However, some of these sites seem to me to not be social networks with cars, games, and photo albums, but more like car, game, and photo sites with some social networking features tacked on. In my opinion, this shouldn't qualify it as a "social networking" site, but, that's neither here nor there.
With the social networking juggernauts' already massive installed userbase, the only way these smaller startups can hope to ever compete is to appeal to this common interest to garner user activity, and, hopefully, ad revenue. Such is the nature of Ning, the focus of yet another project we're working on. Our group has a pretty good thing going thus far, and, we're rather excited about how it's turning out.
Stay tuned.
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I am really enjoying the Steam Community so far. It is big step up for that program that barely had friends lists a few weeks ago.
Hahaha yes, I remember for years, literally YEARS the friends feature was so horribly broken and mangled, nobody used it. Honestly, it never worked, I don't know why they just didn't remove it altogether.
But yes, it's an awesome thing to have now.
I know you can add outside games to your Steam games list, but I wonder if Friends integrates with them. If it did we would have a very viable alternative to Xfire.
Well I don't know about you, but I think that Flickr is and has gotten pretty big. I hear Flickr's name among many places including and not limited to Cameras (a camera from NIKON makes direct uploads to FLICKR), Phones, PDA's, etc. But to tell you the truth, I never thought of it as a social networking site. Always considered it a photo uploading site like putfile, but I guess not.