Niche Social Networks Vie for Attention
MySpace not your cup of tea? Try one of these social-networking sites tailored to fit your personality -- or, learn how to create your own.
Now that moms and dads – not just teens and recent grads – are joining the social-networking craze, niche sites are targeting new users with offerings tailored to specific ages and tastes.
Eons and TeeBeeDee, for example, are betting the baby-boom generation will want to gather with their peers and decide how to spend the inheritance of offspring too busy on MySpace or Facebook to care.
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People in their 30s with photos and news to share with family and friends, but no time for strangers, are finding Multiply a good place to stay connected.
Sites like aSmallWorld offer the exclusivity of a gated community for the jet set. Social rejects need not apply,
Still looking? Then head over to Ning and create your own social network – or join one of the more than 100,000 that others have already launched using the site's tools.
Somewhere in the ever-growing sea of social networks, you're bound to find a place to post your profile. The trick is figuring out where.
Danah Boyd, a Ph.D. student at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information who studies how people behave on these sites, advised in an e-mail the task need not be too hard.
"Choosing a social network is like choosing a bar," she writes. "Find one that fits and that your friends go to."
Friends and family
Peter Pezaris didn't target a specific demographic when he launched Multiply in March 2004. He just wanted a place to privately and easily share photos and musings with people he already knows.
"If you're like me and you're in your mid-30s or something and you got a wife and kids, you're not really all about meeting new people and you're not throwing your whole life out there for anybody to see," he says.
"You're really more interested in communicating with those friends and family that you already have."
So his team built into Multiply privacy tools that allow users to control exactly who sees what they post. Photos of the trip to Paris? Share with your entire network. Your kid at the park? Close friends and family. Kid in the tub? Spouse and grandparents only.
It turns out that thirtysomethings appreciate such tools, being more interested in sharing with their real-world contacts than branching out on the Web to make new ones. The most active of the 6 million users are right around age 35, Pezaris says.
"We happen to be a bunch of guys in our mid 30s, so I don't think it's a coincidence," he adds.
