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Before MySpace was as popular as it is today, I still remember watching G4TV a few years back, the time when it was still just TechTV, before it became G4:TechTV. The time when Chris Pirillo and Cat Schwartz was hosting the show Call for Help. And Cat talked about Friendster, where if you join and add your friends, and they add their friends, you can see the whole network of friends. Then a lot more came out and some that were not really like social networking starting to turn into social networking. And dating sites as well started to add the networking aspect into their sites. And a lot more changes started coming out.

• All the FriendFinder sites started to have the networking side of their system.
• SMS.ac, I site that was intended for sending free SMS messages, started to have a friend network as well.
• Ringo whose purpose was to be like a better Plaxo I guess, also had the networking aspect into it and now they seem to be trying to go into a Flickr direction.
• FaceParty and Face-Pic whose primary purpose was for hosting photos of your face, commonly used by IRC chatters when the only IM’s know that time were ICQ and AIM.
• More recent news is Google buys Orkut and Yahoo buys Facebook, even if Yahoo already has Yahoo360.

If the online dating sites started adding the networking aspect to their system, social networking sites on the other hand seemed to working as well as dating sites in searching for dates, thus giving the dating sites added competition. And this is where niche marketing comes in again and a perfect example of that is the network of sites FriendFinder has:

• FriendFinder: Targeted toward singles looking for love, romance, and even marriage.
• AdultFriendFinder: Targeted to people looking for hmmm sex, yes you read it right. Like one night stand stuff.
• Passion: Targeted for people who are not really the sex maniac type, but wants some romance.
• ALT: These are for the people with their weird fetishes. At least you get to match them well so you know they are compatible.
• OutPersonals and GayFriendFinder: For the gays looking for gays.
• Cams: If cam2cam is your thing, this where you go to.

Today there are many social networking sites and just to name a few more, there is Multiply, Hi5, LinkedIn and more! And since many people are driving their way towards these sites, some companies have been maximizing their use as well for their marketing campaigns. Maybe it is your time to join at least one of them?