Herewith, a summary of social networking sites:



Craigslist [http://www.craigslist.org]
Craigslist is the ultimate online classifieds, but keeps roots in the real world by keep listings based around a metropolitan area. San Francisco and New York are the biggest communities of 25 existing North American cities (SF even has subgeographies such as City, North Bay, Easy Bay, South Bay, etc.), and almost 20 more are slated to launch soon, including Anchorage, Kansas City, and Manila.

Listings run the gamut, including personals, services (e.g. tailoring, interior design), jobs, housing, and stuff for sale. Anonymous email aliases provide an easy way to contact the poster and arrange further details of a trade or sale. I've personally bought several big-ticket items (including my road bike) through Craigslist, and the biggest advantage in buying such personal items in person is that you can bargain on either end of the trade and test 'em out before you commit.

The inordinate number of dorks on this site also lends itself to create uses of online classifieds... Best of Craigslist is the compilation.

Following in Google's steps of text-only ads, Craigslist's completely image-free site architecture is easy to use and very powerful. For all normal purposes, it's free (job listings do cost $75 and only in the SF Bay area)—icing on the cake.


Meetup [http://www.meetup.com]
Actually, this is not Howard Dean's subsidiary—it just so happened that his staff leveraged its tremendous power soon after its launch so that "Dean in 2004" is by far the biggest group, counting 184,800 members to runner-up "Clark in 2004"'s 63,700. Lest you think that this site is purely political, "Chihuahua", "Japanese Language", "Witches," and "Investor's Business Daily" meetups are all scheduled for the upcoming month in my county.

Finding a big event in your area is easy through a ZIP code search on the homepage, but actually registering for it takes a while longer.


Plaxo [http://www.plaxo.com]
Plaxo keeps your list of contacts current by scanning your Outlook mail and address books and sending an email to everyone there, asking them to update their info in a form that feeds into a hosted database. The pain in the ass is that it sends an automated email to your friends asking them to do shit, i.e. log on and update their information apart from simply replying to your email. You, lucky bastard, don't need to compile or input their reply!

For power networking, such as in the business world, this could be invaluable. In my life, this kind of aggressive networking tool isn't that helpful.

Note: Their Mountain View office could use a zip line. One of the founders and I were housemates in downtown Palo Alto for a summer, when I got to check out their HQ I discovered that they have kick-assingly high ceilings.


Evite [http://www.evite.com]
Evite has a niche purpose—to organize large outings (or innings)—, and it fills it tremendously well. For those who've never been Evited before, you can create an invitation by listing event details and inputting the email addresses for invitees. An email is sent to each of those folks, asking them to go onto the site with their RSVP (yes, I know that's not proper French). This extra workload on the recipient is parallel to Plaxo's, but here your recipients have an added incentive that I believe pushes them over the workload edge: they get to partay!

Extremely convenient features include a one-click link to a MapQuest-generated map, the ability to ask more questions than simply "Coming?" and get field-delimited replies, and a perfect-for-potlucks checklist in which you list what you want guests to bring and Evite keeps track of what's still needed on the event homepage.

Well-thought-out features, little bloat. Yay for niche markets!


Orkut [http://www.orkut.com]
Though it brings the priceless cachet of bring parented by Google, Orkut is off-putting in its very method of initiation: you can only join if someone who's already a member invites you. Server speed and streamlinedness characterize this network, but options in personalizing your profile and your rankings of friends do not.


Friendster [http://www.friendster.com]
Testimonials (blurbs on your friends that you can write and they have to approve before they show up alongside your friend's profile) are fun to read, and the ever-exponentiating (is that even a word?) connections are mind-blowing. But: are you really interested in seeing the 700,000+ people you're connected to? The numbers multiply so quickly that so-called "connections" don't mean terribly much. I wouldn't trust, say, a 3rd-degree friend any more than a stranger.

Word on the street is that it is looking to cash in on its now-sizeable cache of users via the ballsy, time-honored method of IPO. One firm indication that they are focusing on profit is the recent appearance of banner and text ads on the site. Before they can be big-time, though, Friendster needs to seriously address its server speeds. Actual outages have noticeably decreased, but it's still slow as molasses.

The Facebook[http://www.thefacebook.com/]
Founded by a Harvard sophomore friend of my friend, it's basically Friendster with far faster servers on which you can only see people from your college/university. Currently, the Facebook is available at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale—a snooty list of schools, mayhap, but I think.

The degree of customization to each school helps justify this exclusivity to some extent. You select your major and residence from a drop-down list, which really helps keep phrasing, spelling, and uPpeRcAsiNG clean enough to deal with and easier to search. You can be linked to people by either friends or classes, and classes are also selected by drop-down list by department and then course number/title. This data is easy enough to copy from some official school intranet registration site, but they did need the contacts to extract it.

Right now, the Facebook's biggest draw is that it weeds out the friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends that superficially inflate a Friendster network. Since you already know you go to school with all of these people, knowing someone's major, residence, and year already give some insight into who they might be.

At the time of this writing, however, The Facebook has over 750 members, and things could quickly balloon out of hand for this simple structure.


Summary
Of these, Craigslist has been invaluable to me. Its great advantage over eBay for personal, big-ticket items is that buyers can preview and test out wares, while sellers can receive payment upon transaction.

The pure peer networks haven't really done much for me. Sure, I've blown several hours just browsing the links, but I think this is short-lived. Craigslist and (to a smaller extent) Evite are the ones I forsee using heavily in the near future, mainly because they harness the internet to facilitate doing something back in the real world.