If you’re one of the people that has recently been thinking about jumping ship from Facebook to a different social networking site (I’m not one of them), here are 5 alternatives you might like.
1. Diaspora* – Although the site is not yet live, it has received a lot of interest from the tech community and recently hit $100,000 in donations. The site’s founders, 4 NYU programming students, describe Diaspora* as software which will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. I hope these guys continue to build buzz and emerge as a legitimate contender in the social networking space in a not too distant future.
2. Bebo – The 3rd largest social networking site behind Facebook and MySpace. The site has groups centered around specific interests, like bands and books. It also offers more comprehensive privacy settings than Facebook. Only downside – it’s shutting down. So join and have fun while you can, before AOL pulls the plug.
3. Friendster – Currently has 115 million registered users and 61 million unique monthly visitors. 90% of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia.
4. Ning – The site was co-founded by Marc Andreessen, originally of Netscape and Opsware fame. Much like Bebo, Ning allows users to create their own social networks around their interests. The site has always offered premium paid services such as additional storage and extra bandwidth and has recently announced it will be shutting down all free networks and moving to a subscription based model.
5. Onesocialweb – Similar to Diaspora*, this is a decentralized social network. Onesocialweb will give users “portable profiles” which will allow them to connect across multiple social networking sites, much like email let’s us share messages via different providers. The developers state they’re working on a platform which will be accessible via web and Android phones, I’m looking forward to the latter.
There are dozens of other popular social networking sites out there, if you know of some cool ones feel free to comment.
