My 5 Favourite Social Networking Websites

The internet has come a long way since my first experiences with it in the early nineties. When we first got the internet at my house, I connected through a 9600 Kilobaud modem, using something I barely remember called Winsock and browsed around using good ole' Netscape Navigator 2.0. The net has gone from text pages, slowly loading 10k images and fodder for cheesy movies starring Keanu Reeves, to the immense, sprawling and endless trough of news, videos, music, opinion and social connectivity that it is today. One of the biggest changes of the past few years is how ordinary people use the internet to produce their own content and share that content with others using social networking platform sites such as MySpace or Facebook. Being that Facebook is not the be all and end all of social media, I have decided to do a little write up on 5 social networking websites that I think are cool and I use the most frequently recently.

Disclaimer: I am not the king of the interweb. You may have never heard of any of these sites, or you may be a power user at all of them. If they are new to you, great, check them out if you think they are interesting. If not, then good for you! You are a savvier web user than I am. Please don't flame me about it.

Last.fm is a site that's new to me, but a quick Wikipedia search tells you it's been around since 2002! Why haven't I heard of this until now? (Answer: because I am not nearly as hip as I think . . .)

Basically, you join the site and start listening to the Last.fm "radio" which plays songs either by tag (rock, indie rock, classic rock, etc.) or by similar artist. That's actually cool enough as Last.fm will continue to stream music you like, but may not have heard of, for hours while you do something else. Just like a real radio, but no DJ's, no commercials, and less of what you don't like. Plus you can ban things (i.e Nickelback) so you never hear it again.

But Last.fm gets better! Socially better.

It has combined listening to songs you like and sharing the songs you like with friends and other users of the site in one slick package. Like a Facebook for music lovers, you create a Last.fm home page with a picture and an about you section and they fill in the details of the songs/artists you have listened to. It creates charts of your most listened to artists/songs and you can even put your custom playlist on your website or blog (see below and to the right for mine).

You no longer need to wear trucker hats or have an asymmetrical hair cut to prove that you listen to cool bands. Last.fm shows off your hipster taste for you.

CreateDebate IS a new site for sure this time. It even has a beta tag on the logo (which for some reason isn't there when you try to save the image and include it on your blog). You also can easily tell that CreateDebate is a fancy Web 2.0, social-networking-platform site because of its logo. It's two colours with a little image on the left and it has a reflection of the log on the bottom. This tells you that the site is cutting edge!

While the logo may be a little cliché the site concept is really cool if you are a nerd like me that likes debating as much as other things that end in bating.

People join up for the site get screen names, home pages and all that jazz, then they start debating. You can either create a debate, or just argue in someone else's. They spit the page in two, and you argue on one side or the other. You can vote peoples arguments up or down, respond to them to oppose or favour or link to other web pages or even embed a video. You can create a whole network of users and classify them as allies or enemies.

If you want to challenge me to a debate, click here.

Metacritic.com is not exactly the most social website when compared to either of their other four. However, there is a social aspect to it, and it is one of the most useful sites I have found in years. The premise is simple: Whenever a new movie, DVD, album, book or video game is released, Metacritic searches the web for all of the major critical reviews of the release. They then take the review, give it a score out of 100 and add it to the rest on the page concerning the movie, DVD, album, book or video game. Then all the reviews are added up and averaged out, giving the new movie or game or whatever a total score somewhere between 0-100 and giving the reader a good idea of exactly how well it was received by critics.

The social aspect of the site involves users signing in and writing their own reviews. All of the user reviews are then totalled and averaged out as well, so for every new movie, DVD, album, game or book released, not only is there a meta critic score, but also a meta user score – for those of us that don't trust professional critics.

Metacritic is so comprehensive and so accurate that it's now my first destination when I am thinking of buying a game or going to a movie.

If any diggers ever read my blog, they would flame me left and right for including Digg in this list, because as far as the average Digger (read: male techie geek) is concerned, Digg always was and always will be the greatest social-networking news site on the internet. Everyone knows about Digg by now and therefore it needs no introduction.

However, if they ventured out of their internet bubble for a few minutes and asked members of the general population if they use Digg to get news, 90% wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Like most good concepts, the concept for Digg is simple. Users submit articles from anywhere on the web and other diggers either digg (vote) it up or bury it down. Only the most dugg stuff in a short period of time makes it to the front page. There is also a very lively comment section that is often at least as interesting as the submission itself.

There is a whole bunch of controversy surrounding Digg's power users and how much influence they have and about a group called the bury brigade that bury some legitimate stories so they never see the light of day. However, just like elementary school, if you avoid the playground fights there is a lot of interesting stuff being uploaded every day. Of course if you liked playground fights back in school then feel free to get involved!

Technorati is another site that probably doesn't need much introduction to all you savvy websters out there. I have been aware of Technorati for years, but I just started actually using it this past couple of weeks. Considering Technorati is the most popular, most sophisticated, portal to the global blogosphere out there right now, it spot on my radar probably has everything to do with the fact that I just started this blog.

If you like blogs, read blogs, or want to be a blogger, immediately sign up right away. If you are a blogger already, there's a 99% chance you have an account. Technorati is set up in such an intuitive way you are going to find new blogs with interesting articles within 10 seconds of being on their front page. You can submit your blog; favourite other people's blogs and start connecting with a community of likeminded bloggers through the sites well designed interface.

The only problem I have found so far is that the site tends to go down a little too often. So far the frustrations have been minor and I strongly recommend this site to anyone interested in the blog world.