Social Media, by the Numbers?

Hi folks -- just a couple of articles about social media that you might be interested in.

* 33 Places to Hangout in the Social Networking Era: Got this one off an discussion e-mail group -- it covers and links to 33 different social networks, grouped by category.

It includes some you've probably heard of, like MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook (AIM Pages even gets a mention, yay), and some that you might not have heard of, like Dogster (dog-focused), Yub.com (shopping) and MuslimSpace (a MySpace clone for Muslims).

With the exploding popularity of different social networking sites, it's no surprise that there are a lot of upstarts trying to carve out their niche on the Web. Who will still be around in 5 years (or even 2)? That wise group of philosophers, Van Halen, once said, "Only time will tell if we stand the test of time."

* In Video Shakeout, Will Eefoof Go Poof?: This is a San Francisco Chronicle article (via Obscurestore.com), talking about the social video sharing competitive landscape.

Of course, the top dog right now is YouTube, but according to article, there are around 240 more sites out there competing for a piece of the pie. So, it's a buyers' market -- and you folks are the buyers.

(Incidentally, if you click through to the SF article, you'll note that the full headline is really long. It's more like a full abstract, than a headline. This is to presumably to make the article more appealing to search engines. Just so you know.)

FYI, the offsite I mentioned this morning (which is just Day One) was pretty much a bunch of us talking about social media topics until our throats were raw and our ears were bleeding. Apologies for the graphic imagery, but it's been a long day.

Thanks -- Joe
Tags: social media, social video sharing, only time will tell if we stand the test of time