Social Networking Sites

There are many different portals to harness social media and many of these have developed their own niches. Even Facebook which was previously seen as social networking central a few years ago has had other serves like Twitter and LinkedIn carve out a niche of their own. In fact many other social networking sites have developed the scope of their product based on concepts first introduced throughout Facebook like status updates, social connected music sharing etc.

Twitter Is essentially Facebook limited to it's status update functionality. People like the simplicity and it's being utilized for different things every day like customer service and marketing. LinkedIn has put up a wall between work and play only focusing on business customers. Something like a mashup between monster.com and Facebook it allows professionals and those looking for a job to network and make new connections.. Although a lot of those services are fee based and that could drive people away especially as new technologies develop that lure customers away. Friendster and myspace were some of the first social networking sites and but since they lost market share to Facebook they have actually abandoned the social communication platform that Facebook built off of to build it's success and focused on creating niche sites (myspace- music; Friendster- games) based on Facebook's advances in those fields.

Google + on the other hand is going for Facebook's throat and challenging their bread and butter, and getting back to basics. Facebook has become bloated with apps, timelines, news feeds, groups, etc.... And every year they pack on more. Google + , seems to want to have all of these features as well, (as it is open to developers) but it does it in a much cleaner and simpler way. The biggest feature they have is circles.. Similar to how Facebook allows you to sort friends, googles circles does the same thing but in a simpler and more intuitive manner.