The Cool Click
Five up-and-coming social networks to watch (and join)
Posterous
A lightweight, super-user-friendly blogging platform on which users can blog via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, a Web interface, and more (unlike, say, Blogger or WordPress, where the user must input posts directly into that site’s interface), the excellent and promising Posterous also easily imports text from existing blogs, and can redirect alternate URLs, which means Blogger or WordPress users can make the switch and retain all their old content, as well as their readers.
FourSquare
Invented by the founder of Dodgeball.com, Foursquare works from its users’ phones and–with GPS technology–lets friends see where their other friends are. As Wired writer Clive Thompson notes, these sites are bigger with “urban hipsters in kind of big cities,” where quite often your friends are just a short walk away.
Plancast
A site to broadcast your plans to your online social circle. Or, as the site’s founder, Mark Hendrickson, describes it: “Foursquare for the future.” However, as TechCrunch.com notes, while Foursquare allows users to tell friends where they are, Plancast is about sharing where they will be.
Diaspora
Diaspora purports to offer a service similar to Facebook, but with more user control: For instance, your profile resides on your computer, not someone else’s server, so if you remove something from your profile, it’s gone (not the case with Facebook). As it says on the site, “Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them.”
Habbo
Imagine the components of a social network as rooms in a hotel and you’ve got the gist of Habbo. Users create cartoon-y avatars and explore the many rooms of the hotel. Furniture can be earned or bought (with real-world money) to decorate your room or curate a public area. How much time could you spend exploring all Habbo has to offer? As one user puts it, “How long is a long time? Loooooool.”
