Back in June 2009, the globe’s potpourri of social-networking sites was dazzlingly diverse: Google’s Orkut dominated India and Brazil; Central and South America preferred Hi5; Maktoob was king in the Arab world. The Vietnamese liked Zing, the Czechs loved Lidé, South Koreans surfed Cyworld. Fast-forward two years, and Facebook has stolen users away from its rivals at a blistering pace. It’s completely knocked Hi5 off the map in former strongholds such as Peru, Mexico, and Thailand. After a tense back-and-forth with Orkut in India, Facebook has emerged victorious. And it’s gaining steady ground in Armenia, Georgia, and the Netherlands, where local providers are making a desperate last stand.

Social Networking has gained much popularity in the recent years because of the opportunities they provide to connect to each other in an easy and timely manner and to exchange various thoughts and. Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Linkedin, Twitter, Friendster, Ibibo, Ning are the popular ones while Facebook is the most favorite Social Networking Website. Facebooking on Internet has become order of the day, not only for youngsters but for all age groups. Facebook sometimes acts as “Power to the people”. While these Social Networks are designed to make people more social, isn’t it funny how Social Networking is making people especially the youngsters more anti-social? Youngsters and teenagers lack the ability to communicate or concentrate away from their
Facebook screens. Their real social network with their family and friends suffers a great deal. They don’t get time to attend people as they prefer to attend `Friend Requests’ on the site.
Home or outside, the Facebook has addicted the brains of young and consume all their time. Adults for adults, children are more vulnerable. It is becoming more and more evident that social networking over the web is the new opium for today’s youngsters.
Though Social Networking sites have brought the world a little closer but they are indirectly discouraging teenagers from having a healthy diet, hence posing a great risk of eating disorders as well.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwire) — 02/23/11 — hi5, one of the world’s leading platforms for social games, today announced the launch of the SocioPay monetization platform designed to maximize revenue for social games. SocioPay dynamically determines the optimal monetization solution for every commerce opportunity, including identifying players who are less likely to purchase and offering advertising as an alternative

to traditional payment options. The launch of the new SocioPay platform marks the first public release of a robust ad/commerce hybridization model for the social games industry. hi5 will demonstrate how early adopters of SocioPay will optimize social game revenues in a dedicated session at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco on March 1 at 11:15 a.m. in Moscone Center’s North Hall, Room 122.

“While results are still early, we expect SocioPay to increase revenue in social games by 200%-300% over traditional commerce and lead-generation offers found on other social networks,” said Monty Kerr, hi5 Vice President of Commerce and Advertising. “The key innovation is that SocioPay extends beyond the hi5 platform; allowing developers to see dramatically increased revenue wherever their social games are distributed — even on other social networks.”

hi5 invites developers who launch their games on hi5 to leverage SocioPay for maximizing revenues everywhere they publish their social games. “We’ve received a lot of requests from developers to help them mitigate the commerce losses they are experiencing with currency and payment solutions on other social networks, and this is certainly an area where we can provide significant support,” said Alex St. John, hi5 President and Chief Technology Officer.

“Over the last year, we’ve been working closely with hi5 on the distribution of our social game titles, Port Casino Poker and Port Casino Blackjack. By implementing SocioPay, we’ll be able to gain actionable insights and achieve measurable improvements in monetization and revenue per user. hi5 is a strategic partner for us as we look to expand our business this year and we are planning to launch more titles leveraging their new SocioPay platform,” said Richard Garriott, Co-founder and Creative Director at Portalarium.

The newly launched SocioPay technology will complement the latest release of SocioPath, the next generation social gaming platform designed to liberate social games from their dependence on social networks through viral audience acquisition, which is also launching at GDC this year. The new version of SocioPath will enable over 100 social games currently distributed on the hi5 platform to be accessible directly from the site without requiring a user account or registration.

“By utilizing the SocioPath platform for our title, Bush Whacker, we’ve been able to take down the barriers to entry and acquire more new users directly into our game. hi5 is driving a new model for virally acquiring audience into social games that is effective and will be instrumental in helping us achieve our growth goals for 2011,” said David Whittaker, Co-founder of DJArts Games.

For more information about the SocioPay monetization platform and the SocioPath next generation social gaming platform, please visit developer.hi5.com :
About hi5
Founded in 2003, hi5 is among the top 20 largest web sites worldwide and one of the leading platforms focused on social entertainment and gaming. hi5 delivers a fun, interactive entertainment experience to millions of visitors worldwide by combining a robust social platform with premium content, including localized social games, virtual goods, avatars and more. The hi5 Game Developer Program enables talented social game developers to drive audience acquisition and monetization of their games on the hi5 platform through free promotion, access to viral channels, a robust commerce platform and favorable revenue shares. To learn more about the program, visit developer.hi5.com :
hi5 and the hi5 logo are trademarks of hi5 Networks, Inc. All other trademarks referenced are the property of their respective owners.

Filed Under: Internet, People, Computing & Information Technology

DISCLAIMER: This is a list of the top 10 social networks but the order can vary, depending on the source of the information. This list, however, will give you an idea about the top social networking websites being visited by people worldwide.

Facebook. A fast-growing social networking website, it recently surpassed MySpace in terms of subscribers. In terms of number of visits (1.2 billion in January 2009 alone), this website is No. 1.

MySpace. This website attracts music lovers. From indie bands to professional artists, you can find them here. But since it’s older than Facebook, this website is fast slipping in the ranking. To date, it has more than 250 million registered users.

Twitter. This microblogging, social networking service allows people to send friends 140-character messages, similar to what we can send via our mobile phone’s SMS feature. If we’re going to look at the numbers from compete.com, 54 million people worldwide visit this website every month.

Flixster. A social network site for movie lovers. Enough said. Also a fast-growing site that has over 53 million visitors a month.

Linkedin. People joke that this website is the most formal and “boring” social network out there because it targets professionals wanting to connect with other professionals. But based on compete.com, it has been getting 42 million visitors every month. This is a social network for businesses, too.

Tagged. Tagged you’re it. No, not really but next time you get a spam invitation from tagged.com, then perhaps you’re one of the 39 million monthly visitors to this social networking website.

Classmates.com. It is the first and oldest social networking website for students. It is still getting about 35 million visitors a month.

hi5. This is popular in Angola, Portugal, Cyprus, Romania, Thailand, Central Africa and Latin America. And it’s open to users 13 years old and older. This website has over 9 million visitors and about 80 million registered users.

Friendster. Did you know that a large number of Friendster users are Filipinos? Yes, this social networking website, which has more than 7 million monthly visitors, has over 90 million registered users. It’s popular in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and of course, the Philippines.

Orkut. Google’s own social networking website is popular in Brazil, Paraguay, India, Pakistan and Estonia. It has over 67 million registered users and about 5 million monthly visitors.

The list goes on.

It also changes very quickly.

Another list

Here’s another list compiled by compete.com.

1. facebook.com
2. myspace.com
3. twitter.com
4. flixster.com
5. linkedin.com
6. tagged.com
7. classmates.com
8. myyearbook.com
9. livejournal.com
10. imeem.com
11. reunion.com
12. ning.com
13. blackplanet.com
14. bebo.com
15. hi5.com
16. yuku.com
17. cafemom.com
18. friendster.com
19. xanga.com
20. 360.yahoo.com
21. orkut.com
22. urbanchat.com
23. fubar.com
24. asiantown.net
25. tickle.com

Social network hi5 is introducing a casual games section to its site today, complete with its recently-launched virtual currency (called “Coins”) and a range of more than 40 arcade, casino, card, sports and strategy games. It’s the latest move in the company’s effort to focus on “social entertainment” — later this year, it plans to introduce instant messaging (wrapped into games, as well), avatars and eventually a full-blown virtual world.
The company is focusing on virtual goods as a way of making money. Although the games are free now, users will be able to buy the currency using their credit cards, then use it to purchase game upgrades, unlock higher levels and downloads — and eventually pay to participate in the virtual world. This feature and revenue stream have proven especially popular with teen and early-20s social network users in China and other Asian countries. Hi5 has more than 60 million monthly active users in a diverse array of countries, from Mexico to Thailand to Romania — mostly between the ages of 15 and 24 (not lucrative ad markets). To make more money from these users, the company is also working to offer games that are specific to various geographies, as it has previously done with its virtual gifts. One day, you might be able to buy a top virtual soccer star in a soccer game on hi5, for example.

The games in the official hi5 games section currently include hi5 branding, but they were developed by third parties, and the site says it is open to talking with other third-party developers about adding their games to the platform. San Francisco-based hi5 already offers a developer platform that some companies use to publish casual games, but the new dedicated games section has the added benefit of, well, being a special promotional section for games, and tight integration with things like the virtual currency. The company isn’t disclosing specifics about how it’s structuring revenue-sharing with game-development partners.

The company is already starting to make money from the site’s new section. The games are Flash-based, and already a place where hi5 is starting to serve “pre-roll” ads that run before a user can begin playing a game. This ad space can be integrated with other ad campaigns running on the hi5 site. (Although when I went to play the soccer game, I got an ad for the New York Times.) The big question is how much San Francisco-based hi5 can make from its ads and virtual goods. Gifts were introduced in early December before the holidays. The company says it’s still too early to start sharing numbers.