The social networks that I am currently part of are hi5,orkut,zebo and now facebook and I get invites for more and more like bigadda etc etc but am quite fedup and joined facebook recently after joining all I can say is well just another social networking site with a slight difference.
I was introduced to the world of social networking with the hi5 network and it was fun at that time to keep in touch with your friends then it started getting very very slow and then you saw the banner ads coming in and then constant server outage and at that point was fed up of it and then moved onto orkut and has been happy on that since joined on the zebo network since it belonged to a friend and was trying to promote it a bit (kinda like doing my part in helping a buddy) but recently with all the noise in the blogosphere and media about facebook and its wild wild 10 billion dollar evaluation finally i joined it to see what is it all about.
In short what I can say about facebook is too many attention grabbing elements on your profile which keep you distracted from one purpose that a social networking site serves and that is too connect with friends and like minded people. Am still happy with orkut and plan to stick to that and also be a bit active on facebook and see where it goes the rumors floating are that orkut will also be opening up their platform to third party developers well I guess at that point of time they will also become like facebook but till that time comes they will offer a much cleaner and better utility to connect to your peers.
Out of all I would say orkut is the one that is good and once they open up the api to outside world I guess they will grow a bit faster but what would really be good is if somehow google were able to convert gmail into a social networking app they have done it with integration of gtalk in the email client but in my opinion if gmail or yahoo or hotmail can offer the added layers ontop of the basic communication layer that an email app provides without hampering the communication layer then that has the potential to be the biggest social network ever.
Don’t forget you can go by for a few days without logging into a social network but you cant let a day go by without logging into your email account and till now that has been the primary source along with IM to stay in touch with your friends. Well if someone is listening then this is a million dollar idea 