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Sure, you know what those Twitter, Facebook, reddit and Digg icons mean at the bottom of most blog posts these days, but what about all those other funny-looking ones? There’s a pantload of them – so many that it can be overwhelming and confusing.
Allow us to break down our 18 favorites for you (click each icon to be taken to their Web site):
1. Delicious
What started out as Del.icio.us has evolved into Delicious.com. One of the better known free social bookmarking sites, Delicious uses tags instead of folders to help you organize your bookmarks. Because they are stored online, your bookmarks are accessible from any computer. You can also share your bookmarks with others, and see what articles are popular for any given topic.
2. StumbleUpon
Like flipping through channels on the television, StumbleUpon allows you to surf the web but only hit the sites that interest you or fit the criteria you choose. The StumbleUpon bar at the top of the screen allows you to stumble to another site, say you like the site, share the site with others, read reviews of the site, or save your favorites. StumbleUpon also can connect with Facebook and has a Firefox add-on.
3. Squidoo
Use Squidoo to find or create useful posts, called lenses, on any topic. By writing on a topic yourself, you share your unique point of view. Ad revenue from ads that are shown on your lens pages makes money, part of which you can donate to a charity, or keep yourself.
4. Kiva
Here’s one of my personal favorites! Kiva is a microdonation site that enables you to donate small amounts (or large amounts) of money to help small entrepreneurs with their businesses, all over the world. Your money is grouped with money from others to make a bigger difference. Follow the stories of the entrepreneurs in the Journal section.
5. Diigo
Both a research tool and a social collaborative community, you can use Diigo to organize your bookmarks, archive pages, and annotate each page. You can also share those pages with others, or create a group with which to collaborate. They also offer free educator upgrades to help teachers organize their lesson plans and communicate with their students.
6. Folkd
This social bookmarking site allows you to save and share bookmarks, tag and organize them, access them from anywhere, see what is popular today, and look at friends’ bookmarks. Installing the bookmark button in your browser allows for easy adding. Big props to these guys, too, for having one of the cooler icons of the lot!
7. Gnolia
Currently invitation only, Gnolia is a community based on sharing and saving links and bookmarks. With its rebirth in 2009, they have incorporated lessons learned from the old Ma.gnolia service, including keeping the site a manageable size. They hope to encourage the growth of the community through personal connections.
8. Plurk
Plurk is a social network that allows you to share what is going on in your life with others. It is different from other social sites in that it displays your updates, and those of your friends, in a timeline format. Why plurk? We have no idea but it sounds pretty cool!
9. SlideShare
SlideShare is a professional media sharing community in which to share presentations and other documents you create. You can share things such as PowerPoint & Keynote presentations, videos, and Word and PDF documents. You choose how public or private your presentations will be.
10. Plaxo
Plaxo is a socially connected address book site which allows you to access information for your contacts from anywhere. It uses Pulse to connect with places like Twitter, Flickr, and other sites. Plaxo allows you to import contacts from your current contact list, and Plaxo Premium allows you to sync your contacts, calendar, and tasks with Outlook.
11. GratitudeLog
Express your gratitude for people, things, companies, or whatever you are grateful for with GratitudeLog, a social networking site. Add friends to your list of people to follow, and show your appreciation for others.
12. APSense
APSense is an affiliate social network where you can share ideas with other affiliate marketers, find new affiliate opportunities, or advertise your own business.
13. iLike
iLike is a social music discovery site where you can share playlists and music recommendations with others. It is partnered with MySpace Music and can be used on sites such as Facebook, Google, Orkut, and others.
14. deviantART
An online social network for artists and art lovers everywhere, deviantART allows artists to display and promote their own work as well as enjoy work by others. Communicate with other artists in the community, sell your art, or purchase artwork on display.
15. Orkut
Orkut, part of Google, is a social community where you can stay in touch with friends by sharing photos and sending notes, find new friends who share your interests, or develop new professional contacts.
16. Mments
Sick of missing interesting comments on articles you read? Tired of having to keep returning to sites to follow comment threads? With Mments you can bookmark a post whose comments you want to follow. Then track your marked conversations together on one page. You can also follow the comments in email or your feed reader.
17. Kirtsy
A social media site, Kirtsy allows you to connect with others, find information, and discover products. Items are submitted by readers. Clicking on posts that you like will help promote items to the top of the list where they can more easily be discovered by others.
18. Simpy
Simpy is a social bookmarking site that allows you to save, organize, and share your bookmarks and notes with friends or groups that you create. You can import and export bookmarks at any time. Simpy will also detect broken bookmark links.
Comments (13)
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Wow, this reminds me of the Dot Com boom of the late 90′s/early 2000′s, but worse. It’s a bunch of indistinguishable services using meaningless buzzwords and performing essentially the same functions you can get from more popular (and widely-used) sites. Why would I ever use Plurk when all my friends are already on Facebook? This all reminds me of The Office (with Ryan’s “Woof” site), and Derrick Comedy’s “Gink” video.
posted by Rocky on 6-7-2010 at 12:13 pm
I actually kind of like the idea of plurk. Because some of my friends on FB status update like crazy and it would be kind of nice to see those posts in time line form versus how popular the post is.
posted by Tessa on 6-7-2010 at 12:19 pm
Have often wondered what all of the icons mean, so this is certainly a great list that can be used as a quick reference.
However, what’s the point? Twitter, FB, and Digg receive most of the relevant traffic on the web and have the most vibrant communities (At the moment) – all of the others are simply miscellaneous ‘Me too’ Social Network sites that most professionals do not have time to manage. Social Media overload will soon be a pending complication and many will purge the irrelevant to focus on their few core social environments.
posted by VAL on 6-7-2010 at 12:24 pm
Tessa– on the front page of Facebook, click on “Most Recent” at the top and it will show all of your friends’ updates in reverse chronological order.
posted by Rocky on 6-7-2010 at 1:07 pm
When was the last time anyone wrote a letter? You know, on paper and stuff? And put a stamp on it? Dropped it in a mailbox?
Don’t you just love getting mail and recognizing the handwriting on the envelope?
Sorry. Rant for the week. But try it. You’ll make someone’s day.
posted by Michael on 6-7-2010 at 2:20 pm
I don’t use any social networking sites except for deviantArt and LiveJournal. I don’t know about the rest of these sites, but don’t knock em til you try them! dA is an awesome collection of galleries of both professional and amateur artists, in every category imaginable: traditional art, digital art, comics, photography, sewing/knitting, cosplay, etc. Many professional artists I know use dA as a portfolio, or just as a creative outlet to share their work. I myself have been paid for commission work on dA. Even if you’re not an artist, if you simply enjoy art, I can guarantee you will find something to enjoy there.
posted by Jina on 6-7-2010 at 2:57 pm
@Michael… just last week. :)
posted by Helenann on 6-7-2010 at 4:22 pm
I don’t do Facebook or Twitter; I don’t put my pictures up on Flick’r or Shutterfly; and I’m certainly not gonna get involved with any of these 18. They strike me as just that many more ways to waste time at the keyboard — and I do that well enough now what with this place plus the couple of other bulletin boards I regularly check on and post to.
-”BB”-
posted by Bicycle Bill on 6-7-2010 at 5:58 pm
Nice list, saw a few I haven’t heard about in some time now.
There’s enough pieces of the pie to go around, and with the growing internationalization of social media, more and more players will get involved. Facebook may only have a few years left before they hit max potential, so it’s going to be interesting to see if another large entity replaces Facebook (dif from Twitter) or will it be a bunch of smaller warring factions.
Anyhow, always enjoyable to read what’s on Mental Floss!
posted by Omar Alam on 6-7-2010 at 11:43 pm
Too much social networking!! EEEEK
posted by KerriD on 6-8-2010 at 11:27 am
plaxo will also offer to spam your contacts to “update their info” frequently.
posted by moonablaze on 6-8-2010 at 9:59 pm
“8 Websites You Need to Stop Building” care of The Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/websites_stop
posted by Lynnie on 6-13-2010 at 6:24 pm
I love deviantart. I find it’s a nice way to not just share art, but save art in a much different way than flickr or photoshop or anything like that. It’s like the difference between a picture that goes into your photo-album (collecting dust on the shelf until you possibly pull it out for company) compared to one that goes in a picture frame on the wall for all to see any time they are over.
The search results also yeild more of what I’m looking for, and it’s amazing to see someone’s art grow. I actually never thought of it as a social networking site. As I just go there and browse, even without being logged in.
I guess I’m only writing this because I feel that the people complaining about social networking sites are wrongly lumping dA in there as if it’s FB for art.. or that it’s just like flickr or something of that sort.
posted by Dazee on 6-17-2010 at 7:49 pm