I read this interesting article on the net about the five most beautiful social networking sites (no these are not sites with most profiles of beautiful girls)

Here is what was written about these sites

1. www.virb.com

-generally known as the designer’s MySpace, Virb lives up to the hype by offering sleek and easy-to-customize profile design. The details on various features, for example music and video player, are quite polished - even the ads look nice. If blinking images, huge sigs that mess up the formatting and colorful backgrounds make you insane, Virb is the right place for you.

2. www.trig.com

Trig is a sweet sight for the sore eyes of a web designer/hipster who spent too many days wailing about horrid MySpace profiles. It’s quite similar to Virb but in our opinion looks even nicer, with black and 20 shades of gray being the dominant colors. Trig is mostly music-oriented, so if you have a band that’s simply too artsy to have a MySpace profile, you know what to do

3. www.purevolume.com

neat and tidy are the words that first come to mind when you first look at Purevolume. The site is purely music-oriented and the profiles are divided between artists and listeners. The actual profiles, while beautiful, have the problem of looking all pretty much the same; we like the black/white/gray look, but more customization options wouldn’t hurt.

4. www.9rules.com

9rules is a blogging community which always put a lot of emphasis on quality design, so it’s no wonder that their social network, my.9rules, looks very neat, too. Just like on Purevolume, though, the profiles on 9rules are visually very similar, which keeps the look of the site consistent but it also makes the whole experience slightly dull.

5. www.pownce.com

Pownce has been categorized as everything: from web-based IM to a forum, so we guess that simply calling it a social network isn’t that far off. Taking the Twitter recipe and perfecting it, Pownce added some of its own flavor to the mix, and one of the features we really like about it are skins. Don’t get us wrong, Pownce looks nice to begin with, but having the option to change the skins is a big plus. Currently, the only beef we have with this feature is the fact that the available amount of skins is so small: only four. Give us more!

New figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers show that Internet advertising continues to grow to record levels, with the 3rd quarter Internet ad spend in the United States hitting $5.2 billion, a $1.1 billion/ 25.3% increase over the same quarter in 2006.

What was interesting in this report was whilst the $5.2 billion figure is a record month, the growth rate quarters on quarter are not that spectacular; the third quarter was up only three percent on Q2. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; three percent may not sound a lot, but if it were 33% the cries of bubble would be heard loud and wide. 3% is a sustainable, healthy number that will bring joy to many online who rely on advertising without the related fear that the growth may not be sustainable.

Internet advertising for the first nine months of 2007 totaled $15.2 billion, up 26% over the $12.1 billion recorded the same period in 2006. What can be obvious is with new declarations from big players like facebook that they are going to have a ads on their social networking platform this niche sector of online advertising through social networking platforms is going to grow big time and there is almost certainty other players will also jump into this field so we can expect more and more growth in this sector.

While doing some research on social networking domain, found some interesting figures to share, which will surely drive the social network development companies.

Market at a glance-

• The market for the internet and social networking communities is estimated at about USD 1500M this year.
• Social network/Community development and enhancement individually by 2006 stood at USD 700M and is estimated to touch USD 4000M by 2010.
• The top 3 player in the market are Myspace, Facebook and Bebo with market shares 80.74%, 10.32%, 1.18% respectively.( data is based on custom category of 20 of the leading social networking websites ranked by market share of visits, which is the percentage of traffic to the site, based on Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users. The percentages represent the market share of visits among the websites within the custom category.)

Growth Path-

• Social networking sites are growing 47% year on year increasing from an audience of 46.8 million to 68.8 million in April 2006.
• Social networking sites are the reality of the Internet; the content is relatively inexpensive for publishers to produce.
• It will become more ingrained in mainstream sites, just as reality TV shows.
• MySpace.com, the top Social Networking site of all in terms of number of registered users, saw a staggering 367% increase. The graph is still increasing with many more Social Networking players jumping in; the web scene seems set just right for Social Networking.
• The social networking sites that are seeing strong growth have developed a unique online presence which is refreshed by user generated content. This promotes ongoing consumers interest and visitor loyalty. The market share of Internet visits to the top 20 social networking websites grew by 11.5 percent from January to February 2007, to account for 6.5 percent of all Internet visits in February 2007.

Mobile Social Networking- The nest destination

• Social networking is going mobile and is poised for spectacular growth over the next five years, mobile social communities will be attracting members in swarms, more than tripling in size from 50 millions to 174 millions by 2011.
• For the moment, MySpace and Facebook are hot. News Corp. paid $580 million last year for MySpace as part of a $1.3 billion Internet acquisition spree. Facebook just received an additional $25 million in venture capital.
• Both companies are planning to extend their reach beyond the computer screen to cell phones.
• Cingular Wireless, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless are starting a service that will allow users to post messages on Facebook’s home pages or search for other users’ phone numbers and email addresses from a cell phone.
• MySpace has a pact with Helio, a wireless joint venture between SK Telecom and Earthlink, which will allow users to send photos and update their blogs or profiles by cell phone.

Advertising-

• Social networks are an integral part of the cultural fabric of the internet and their rapidly growing and demographically appealing audience has attracted the attention of advertisers.
• According to the latest forecasts, marketers will pony up an estimated $280 M in the USA to advertise.
• By 2010, the online advertising spend will grow to $1.8 billion.
• Marketer estimates that the social networking ad spend of the USA will rise to $260 million in 2007(up from $95 million in 2006), and by 2010 is expected to reach $665 million.

Advantages-

• Advertising on social networks will teach marketers important ways to reach newly-empowered consumers.
• Social networks will have an incalculable influence on all advertising, both online and offline.
• If companies can go even deeper to develop marketing efforts that fully embrace the “one-to-one-to-many nature of social networks, ad revenues will soar. This way of advertising will spill over into other channels. The underlying concept will influence the way advertising is done in all media, not just online.

Social Networking- The revenue Generator

• Advertisers delight- Advertisers can target local as well as international market at one place.
• Social networks are becoming a good environment to sell products, especially if marketers want to cultivate a brand and get its loyal users to do the selling and evangelizing. That evangelism happens in a community.
• Recruiters’ Heaven- Now a day, top MNCs are hiring from professional social networking sites like Linkedin. They can also check the social index and compatibility of the candidate along with the background check, which is helping them to save a lot of money.
• The cost of gaining new customers is practically nothing because users join voluntarily and provide their own content through their profiles.
• The interactive nature of social networking sites keeps visitors coming back which helps the sites to retention rate high.
• The cost of running the sites’ web servers is relatively low. If a classic advertising or subscription revenue model is used, low cost social network sites could be highly profitable.

All the above information concretes our philosophy that social networking as a domain for business is going to stay and grow in a rapid rate.

News aggregation community Digg has announced a number of new features designed to take the site’s social networking beyond simply “digging” and “burying” headlines and blog entries.

Starting Wednesday night, members of the site can further customize their account profiles so that they more closely resemble something on a social-networking site–more personal information, bigger photos, and a more extensive record of site activity. They will also be able to use their friends lists as content filters so that their “social news” comes from a select group rather than the Digg community as a whole.

That’s not all. In a video posted on the Digg blog, founder Kevin Rose boasted that the site has launched more than 50 new features. Among them are “shout,” so that users can send quick messages to people on their friends lists, and a “sharing” function much like Facebook’s–or the link-sharing feature in Rose’s other start-up, Pownce.

In addition, more new Digg features are on the calendar: in late October, the long-awaited “Digg Images” section, where people will be able to submit and vote on images rather than news stories, will launch. Later this year, the site will release a recommendations engine that sounds much like StumbleUpon, as well as a way for people to craft customized e-mail alerts.

By allowing individual Diggers to shape their identities–and their methods of news consumption–on the site, the company may be doing some image therapy, whether intended or unintended. Digg, touted upon its launch as a small media revolution, has become wildly popular (the company’s statistics say 19.3 million unique visitors in August) but nevertheless has gained a reputation as being a geek hub–its audience is often compared to that of veteran “nerd news” sites like Slashdot and Fark.

Stories about the likes of Linux and HD DVD often dominate the front page, and if there’s any kind of iPhone news, forget about finding much else in the top 10. But that could change with extensive customization features that will allow relative Luddites to block out the swarms of Apple and Google junkies, as well as more detailed profiles that highlight individual Digger identities rather than allowing the community to blend into an amorphous mass of vociferous tech newshounds.

And that might be exactly what Digg needs.

The company is certainly highlighting its desire to retool its reputation. “Digg has made great progress expanding beyond its roots in tech news: page views of content related to technology currently represent only 12 percent of all page views on Digg,” the company said in a statement Wednesday. “This trend, which started about a year ago when nontech content submissions first outnumbered tech content submissions, continues to grow as the Digg user base becomes more diverse.”

News aggregation site Congoo just announced that interested members can start testing out its new social networking features. It’ll launch in full at the beginning of July.

The service already allows you to create your own custom news portal based on your specific areas of interest. You can then share that portal with friends, or opt to have a daily news briefing sent to your inbox. We’re not talking just “Business” or “Entertainment”; Congoo’s options are much more niche-oriented than the likes of Google News, from “Nanotechnology” to “Internet Telephony.” The real draw is that it provides members with limited access to subscription-only news articles, like those from the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times Web sites, through its NetPass search toolbar. The site claims that stories are drawn from over 25,000 sources and that the site is updated automatically every 15 minutes.

Now, with the new networking features, each vertical news category is accompanied by a list of members who are interested in that subject and allows them to interact with one another. The options for filling out a Congoo profile are much more along the lines of LinkedIn than MySpace–clearly, this is for grown-ups. By focusing its networking features on the consumption of news, Congoo is essentially creating a target demographic of well-informed Web users. Its professionally-focused categories give off a very different vibe than Digg, which is typically the site that comes to mind when “social news” is mentioned. On the surface, centering a social networking site around industry news seems like a great solution for attracting a smart crowd that’s looking to interact with other people but not necessarily on a strictly-business level. Unfortunately, Congoo doesn’t quite get there.