Redux -- algorithm discovers friends for you

You fill out a profile with all the standard questions (music, age, sex, books) with the added bonus of an optional Myers-Briggs personality test. The site also lets users post photos, list their location, or chat with each other... The algorithm isn’t “dumb” or based purely on matching up people based on answering questions the same. It actually learns what properties signify compatibility based on how people use the site and takes special care to match people up with niche interests (something Shirazi calls the “Anomaly Filter”).

Good2gether -- connecting nonprofits with people and resources they need

Needs distributed through local news sites.

iMedix -- health search + patient social network

It's ludicrous that it took this long for this to appear.

Divorce360 -- not just feel-good stuff

Given how entangled divorce can get, thank goodness a useful service like this is around.

Each category has four sub-categories (legal, financial, emotional, children). Each page has content relevant to the category - paid contributions by journalists, blog posts by users, a Q&A section (with questions and answers provided by users) and video.

Fatdoor -- social network for neighbors

I thought of this too far back, when social network platform didn't exist yet. I'm just too busy now.

HiveLive social networking platform

Some customizability:

Network users can choose to add their own hives to an existing social network, configure the type of hive (blog, forum, wiki, etc.), and then determine who within the network gets to use them (everyone or just a subset of friends and colleagues). This allows users to stake off their own areas of interaction and undergo activities from there.

Enurgi -- helping the elderly and disabled find better care

Caregivers and care recipients can establish relationships by sending each other messages through the website. Enurgi will then keep track of these relationships, help schedule sessions with its calendaring system, and manage all of the payments that clients send to their caregivers through the website (powered by PayPal). Clients can also post reviews of their caregivers that can be viewed by other potential clients.

Meetro -- make your own forum

The project, codenamed “Makaha”, has been in development since the beginning of this year. While many forums require users to find their own hosting and install software, Makaha will enable users to create and personalize forums through a point-and-click interface.

LifeAt -- a social network for your building

Makes sense for a residential building, doesn't it?

Ziitrend -- latest social prediction website

You simply make a prediction, and ZiiTrend’s neural-network algorithm blends your answer with everyone else’s to come up with a statistically valid answer that captures the crowd’s intelligence. Rather than revolving around trading, which is hard for many people to grasp, the site’s main appeal is designed to be more around social news exchange.

Facebook's app economy

Coders are making real money riding the Facebook phenomenon. It's been the simple apps that have gone wildly viral.

More than Ning -- many ways to build your own web social network

Techcrunch has bothered to organize a chart of the sites where you can make your own social network like myspace and facebook, with feature breakdown like widget transportability, API availability, chat.

Boomj.com -- social network for baby boomers

Covering health, finance, travel, ...

How Facebook could crush MySpace, Yahoo! and Google

The opposing view to the earlier one which I had neglected to credit to Jason Kottke. You can indeed sit in one place and do many things -- like third-party Lending Club -- but you also get updated as to what friends are doing.

Sure, the other portals incorporate Gmail and BBC headlines and YouTube searches and podcast directories. By adding a social context to all of this content, however, Facebook would immediately trump its main competition. With Facebook's News Feed, it's elementary to see when your friends sign up for a new product or service. That means the best add-ons become viral instantly...

Kottke argues, though, that like AOL, Facebook closes off public browsing and participation (yes, its reason for its growth) and that limits how much of a success it can be in the Wild Web. It personally makes sense for me if the friend activity update functionality (news, links, events, products, services, ...) would just fit as a fancier looking feed in my reader. They need to widget parts of it so it can fit into other platforms.

American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

A ethnography doctoral candidate's take on how social network space is fragmenting. Freaks and geeks to MySpace, wealthier and establishment crowd to Facebook. Interesting mention of a PBS Frontline video entitled The Lost Children of Rockdale County, where parents are unaware of their "good" kids' shocking behavior.

CarPool app for Facebook

So now, Facebook members can carpool. Facebook is all about the user-developed apps. I've read assertions of its inability to last because it requires a login, but we'll see.