The Right Social Network for You

Whether you're looking for a job, a party or long-lost friends, your ideal online meeting place is out there. We'll help you find it.

With hundreds of millions of user accounts, MySpace is the Internet's most recognizable (and reviled) social network. From teenagers to grandmas, seemingly everybody has a page. But Rupert Murdoch's online leviathan may not be the best option for satisfying your Web communication needs. Nimble new startup companies are creating both general-purpose and specialized services--all of them free, just as MySpace is--that could get you a job, find you a date, connect you with friends new and old, and fill your life with beautiful music.

With so many social networks dotting the Web, though, it's hard to know which ones are worth your time and bandwidth. To help clarify things, we examined 17 alternatives to MySpace in five broad categories: general-purpose, special-purpose, taste-based, mobile, and media-sharing social networks. As we discuss our findings, we'll also offer a few tips for maintaining your safety and privacy, finding friends online, and getting the most out of each service.

Part 1

• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Part 2

• Twitter
• iMedix, BlackPlanet.com, MiGente, AsianAve.com, and TeeBeeDee.com
• Ning

Part 3

• LibraryThing
• Last.fm
• Pandora
• iMeem

Part 4

• Dodgeball
• Dada.net
• eSnips
• Scribd

Though it began in 2004 as an online yearbook for Harvard students, Facebook soon opened its membership to other universities, then high schools, then everyone else. You can search for friends according to their school, city, or work affiliations, and you can join more than one of these networks, allowing you to maintain connections with ex-classmates, neighbors, and coworkers. Using this approach, the site has grown to a staggering 60 million members. Its main features--photo and video sharing, messaging, and public message boards--are similar to those on MySpace, but it eschews the crazy skins and music players that render many MySpace profiles illegible.

Unfortunately, beneath Facebook's clean, blue-and-white facade lies potential risk. Last year, Facebook's controversial Beacon advertising scheme, which made members' online purchases viewable by other members, caused an uproar as members objected to being transformed into unwitting (and uncompensated) product endorsers. If you (reasonably) worry that such a privacy gaffe could recur, you can use Facebook's fine-grained security settings to establish an appropriate level of privacy protection. See "Give Your Facebook Page a Much-Needed Lift" from our December 2007 issue for additional Facebook safety and customization tips.

Unlike Facebook and MySpace, which are essentially about fun and friends, LinkedIn promotes your career or your business. LinkedIn has become one of the most talked-about social networks, and has quickly grown to nearly 20 million members.

Like other social networks, LinkedIn revolves around your personal profile. But instead of displaying lists of your favorite bands and collections of party snapshots, your LinkedIn profile showcases your employment history, your professional skills, and your education and awards, and explains how and why you want to be contacted. To get the most out of your LinkedIn membership, you should make these entries brief, complete, and sparkling, just as you would on any résumé or curriculum vitae. The most important items in your profile, however, are the recommendations you receive from current and former coworkers and employers regarding the positions you've held. As more members write recommendations about you, you can decide whether to include them in your profile. The more positive recommendations you have, the better you'll look to potential employers in LinkedIn's Jobs & Hiring area, and to prospective clients in the Services area. To improve your chances of receiving a recommendation, consider writing recommendations for your connections without waiting until they ask you for one.

Is Twitter really a social network? Yes, but not in the way Facebook and MySpace are. The content that drives Twitter is a relentless stream of real-time personal status postings called tweets, each limited to a maximum of 140 characters. "Going out for more batteries," or "Feeling snacky, I think I'll have a salad" are the stuff of Twitter greatness--as long as tracking your friends' ephemeral actions and mutterings is your cup of tea.

After you've signed up, it's worthwhile to peruse the ever-changing public updates page--to see the variety of ways people use Twitter and to find interesting Twitterers to follow. You can also allow Twitter to search through your e-mail address book to see whether any of your contacts are already Twitter users. In time, other people may follow your tweets, too. If you'd rather not broadcast your posts to the universe, select the 'Protect my Updates' option in Twitter's settings to keep your posts out of the public timeline and approve any followers before they can see your tweets. You can even have Twitter "nudge" you with an e-mail reminder should you forget to post for a while. When you're away from your computer, Twitter permits you to send and receive tweets on your cell phone via SMS or Twitter's mobile Web site. I recently used the latter to keep tabs on Steve Jobs's January Macworld Expo keynote via the twittering of several Mac pundits in the audience.

The problem with the big mass-market social networks is that, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, nobody uses them any more--they're too crowded. How will anyone find your profile among the 400 million MySpace pages? Now, however, thousands of social networking sites have emerged that are built around specific activities, ideas, or interests, or that target particular groups of people, such as Baby Boomers.

Some examples: With help from the no-frills iMedix, you can find information on the Web related to specific conditions or illnesses, and chat with or e-mail other people who have the same concerns. At BlackPlanet.com, African-Americans can connect around various topics or geographic locations; MiGente is a sibling site with similar features intended for the Latino community, and AsianAve.com serves Asian communities. And people who are approaching or already experiencing their golden years can make virtual connections at TeeBeeDee, a site dedicated to social networkers ages 40 and up.