Flipside Journal

Shorts & Rants: Choose Your Topic

Interested in meeting, socializing and making new friends online? Here’s a list of of nearly 100+ sites organized by the following categories: Books, Business, Family, Friends, Hobbies & Interests, Shopping, and Travel. You can find even more at the site Social Networking God (a list of over 350 plus 100 more when you read the comments left by others):

Books:

Americasbookshelf.com - One of the largest book exchange clubs across the US.

BooksConnect - A book sharing community site connecting readers, authors, publishers, librarians and booksellers.

BookCrossing.com - A community of users from over 130 countries who exchange books with each other at public places like cafes, parks etc.

Bookins.com - Book sharing website that enables members to exchange used books with each other in real time.

BookMooch.com - An interesting concept where users can exchange books with others through points. Users gain points when they give books to others.

Booksalescout.com - Online community of users allowing them to sell books in the US.

Bookswim.com - Book borrowing service with free shipping for registered members of the website.

ConnectViaBooks - A social networking site connecting book lovers and enabling them to discover other similar interests.

GoodReads - GoodReads is a book reader’s community enabling members to review, share books they have been reading.

LibraryThing - Enter what you’re reading or your whole library—it’s an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things.

PaperBackSwap.com - Users can share books amongst each other and only pay for the delivery charges.

Pazap.com - A book trade engine for students to buy and sell old books.

Read It Swap It - A free service that allows users to exchange books with others.

Revish - Revish is another community for book lovers, letting them review their favorite books, group up, or simply tell the world what they’re currently reading.

Shelfari - Shelfari is a popular social networking service for book lovers.

Socialbib - Book swapping network between students.

Business

AdvisorGarage - It is an online directory of advisers who are willing to assist budding entrepreneurs.

ArtBreak - ArtBreak is an artist community for sharing and selling artwork.

Blogtronix - Blogtronix promotes corporate social networking, enterprise 2.0 and wikis.

CompanyLoop - An online co-working community for global businesses.

ConnectBeam - Connectbeam offers social networking specially designed for corporate users.

Decorati - An interior designer community enabling users to post items for sale and for exchange.

DoMyStuff - A good site for working professionals looking to find online assistants.

Doostang - An invite only career community for professionals.

Fast Pitch - It is a quickly growing business networking community in corporate world. Its on-line provides users with a one-stop shop network to market their business.

ImageKind - ImageKind is a community and marketplace for professional artists.

Jambo - Jambo lets you connect with your neighborhood friends.

Jigsaw - An on-line business card networking directory for users to establish contacts with each other. Each business card is listed with an email id and a contact number.

Konnects - Konnects enables members to create their own professional networking communities.

Lawyrs - A professional social networking community for lawyers.

Linkedin - LinkedIn is a professional social networking website for business users, one of the most popular of such sites out there. Some aspects of it are free, but many are paid.

mediabistro.com - mediabistro.com is for professionals in content or creative industry.

Pairup.com - Pairup connects business travelers assisting them to travel together.

Ryze.com - A site for establishing new connections and growing networks. Connections for jobs, building career and making sales.

Spoke.com - Spoke offers access to business network of over 40 million people worldwide.

Visible Path - Visible Path helps organizations to integrate social networking into their existing tools.

WebCrossing Neighbors - It provides a private label social network with personal spaces and user groups.

XING - XING is a networking directory of business contacts powering relationships between business professionals allowing users to connect with each other.

Family

Amiglia - A family networking service enabling users to connect to family members by publishing and sharing family trees, photos etc.

CafeMom - CafeMom is a social networking site for mothers to connect and share thoughts with each other.

Cingo - Cingo users connect with each other to organize their family life.

CommonGate - A social networking platform that enables users to create their own social network for their friends, family or organization.

Family 2.0 - Family 2.0 helps you create your own family social network, you can add family members, send personalized emails and create event alerts.

Famiva - A premier social network to connect with family members and relatives in a secure environment.

Famster - A private secure social network for family members.

Geni.com - An exciting social networking site enabling members to create their family tree. Although it’s a relatively new site, it has grown tremendously fast, and has hundreds of thousands of users.

Genoom - Genoom creates a meeting place for its site users. They can create a family network by inviting their relatives and discover their past memories.

Kincafe - An ideal social network for families to connect with their beloved ones.

Kinzin - Kinzin is an on-line meeting place for families to share family events, photos, stories and recipes.

MayasMoM - A family networking site for parents.

Minti - A collaborative parenting site.

MomJunction - MomJunction allows mothers to find reliable answers to questions, create private spaces with friends and build communities.

MothersClick - MothersClick connects mothers in a neighborhood with each and provides parenting advice to them.

myfamily.com - An excellent way to connect with your family members.

OneGreatFamily.com - An on-line shared database with combined knowledge and data at a single place.

OurStory.com - OurStory enables users to share stories of their families with others.

Parentography - A social network offering advice and advice for families.

The Family Post - A sharing network for communication with family members.

Friends

Amitize.com - Amitize is a worldwide friendship network.

aSmallWorld - aSmallWorld is a private on-line community designed for individuals who would like to connect, re-connect to share similar thoughts with each other.

Badoo.Com - Badoo is a dynamic multi-lingual social networking site with innovative photo and video features that allows its users worldwide to gain an instant mass audience and interact both locally and globally.

Bebo - Bebo is a hugely popular site (especially in the UK), and similar in philosophy to MySpace. It allows users to communicate with their friends in multiple ways including blogging, sending messages and posting pictures.

Eons - An on-line gathering place for the elderly; most of the users are over the age of 50 years.

Facebook.com - Facebook is a social networking phenomenon connecting people with their friends, family and other users with similar interests.

Flickr.com - One of the biggest social networking platforms with features of sharing photos.

Flingr - Flingr allows users to connect with all categories of friends – colleagues, college mates and school buddies.

FlipsideJourney - A wicked local social blogging and networking site for people over 50 who want to learn about their neighborhoods and share their views on humor, short stories and neighborhood rants.

Friendster - It is a popular global social network for finding new friends and developing friendships as well as searching old friends.

hi5 - Hi5 is a prominent social networking service in India with over 40 million users. However, Hi5 has recently experienced an upsurge beyond India and has shown increasing popularity in EU too.

Lovento - Lovento allows you to discover news friends and also find information about latest events.

Multiply.com - Multiply is a social networking website providing easy way to share digital media which includes photos, videos and music.

Mycool - Mycool enables members to find and share their interests with special groups.

MySpace.com - MySpace is an interactive social networking website consisting of personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. It’s currently the biggest social networking site out there, and while it might not be the most advanced one, the users seem to love its simplicity.

NetFriendships.com - A comprehensive social networking site enabling users to make new online friends and discover old ones.

Netlog - A social community of more than 20 million young Europeans.

Orkut - Orkut is a social networking service owned by Google. It enables users to meet new friends and create communities.

Passado - Passado is Europe’s no.1 re-union website connecting members with friends from school to workplace.

Piczo - Piczo offers safe social networking environment for youngster around the world. Piczo users can design their personal website with photos, videos etc. and share it with their friends.

Plazes - A social networking website for connecting with local users.

Pownce.com - Pownce is a mix of social networking and microblogging. It enables users to send messages, files, events and links with each other.

reunion.com - A leading on-line service for discovering old friends, classmates and family members.

TBD.com - An on-line gathering place for people over 40; most of the users are over the age of 50 years.

Vox.com - Vox is a social blogging service where users share their ideas, photos, videos with family and friends.

Xanga - Xanga is one of the biggest social networking platforms with features of sharing photos, photos and videos.

XuQa - An on-line college social networking site with poker gaming features.

Hobbies and Interest

ActionProfiles.com - It is social networking community for sports and action. The features of the website are profiles of users with photographs and videos, reviews of products and job discussion boards.

Arts community - Arts community provides a dynamic community experience by providing extensive listing of exhibitions, events and openings.

BeGreen - BeGreen is a community that aims to generate environmental awareness for users.

beRecruited - beRecruited is a dedicated on-line community for sports persons and coaches.

BottleTalk - BottleTalk is a wine lover’s community making it easy for members to share their drinking experiences.

CarGurus - An automobile community website enabling users to post car reviews, photos and share opinions.

Change - Change is a nonprofit social networking website that connects like minded users and allows them to exchange information.

ChangingThePresent - A nonprofit fund raising community with membership of over 400 nonprofits.

ChickAdvisor - ChickAdvisor is a sharing community for women users.

CircleUp - CircleUp is one of the best community website connecting users to groups, clubs for knowledge sharing, information exchange.

Coastr - Coastr connects beer lovers with each other.

ColShare - ColShare is a community for people who have hobby of collecting items like coins, stamps etc.

coRank - A rating community for users to share interesting information on internet.

DailyStrength - A huge community of over 500 groups dealing with health issues and various medical challenges.

Dundoo - Dundoo enables users to create image collages out of social networking profile. A big amount of ads on the site somewhat diminishes the overall impression.

Flixster - Flixster is a community for movie lovers.

FuelEmpire - FuelEmpire brings automobile enthusiasts together at one place.

GirlSense - A community for girls to promote their fashion designs & creations.

Greenvoice - An online networking platform for people who are conscious about the environment, who want to inform each other on environmental issues and create a difference.

iYomu - iYomu is an adult social networking website and it allows users to search for site members who have similar interests or for business needs.

Motortopia - Motortopia is community for automobile lovers. It consists of passionate lovers of bikes, planes, cars and boats etc.

MyCatSpace - MyCatSpace is a community for lovers of cats passionate to share experiences of their cats with others.

MyDogSpace - MyDogSpace users can share their dog pictures, write blog posts about dogs and communicate with other dog lovers, all in a very lovely community.

Uniteddogs - A social networking website for dog owners. The dog owners can creae profiles of their dogs, create blogs and share their thoughts.

vSocial - vSocial is a video based social networking platform allowing content owners, site operators to deliver the message online with video.

Shopping

Crowdstorm - Crowdstorm is an innovative social shopping service using product buzz in the blogosphere to help you find what to buy. You can even add your own favorite products and edit ones already in their databases. Commenting on products and adding to wish-lists is really simple. All of this corroborates into a great social shopping and recommendations system.

Etsy - Etsy is a very nicely implemented, well designed social marketplace for handmade items. A more innovative eBay. The selection of items and active community contribute well to the overall shopping experience. Etsy is the place to look for unique handmade art, jewelery and much more.

Zebo - A simple site made for lists of what you already own, not what you want. Some users list generic items, others, more focused towards brand names. You can even input pictures, youtube videos, and myspace slideshows into your lists. Zebo also features fairly simplistic and straight-forward social-networking, which allows you to add yourself to various networks and invite your friends. Not sold on that color scheme though.

ThisNext - An interactive wish-list based shopping network with a recommendation system based on opinions from real people. You can add or recommend various products by entering their websites, or simply searching the service’s database. You can also create wish-lists with the direct ability to buy the items from ThisNext. The service also incorporates trackbacks so you can drive a little traffic to your blog if you so wish. Nevertheless, its main feature is still its recommendation system which tells you what to buy next, thus, ThisNext.

Kaboodle - Share product recommendations with the community and discover new stuff from users with similar tastes and styles. When you see something you’re interested in buying, just click the bookmarklet and it’ll fetch all of the necessary info; you can also browse what the community’s been bookmarking and comment on their bookmarklets. Just sold to Hearst Magazines this week.

Wists - Another wish-list creation service, Wists has the ability to create image bookmarks for anywhere on the web without uploading anything. After first adding your bookmarklets to your favorite items you can clip appropriate images and info from shopping sites to your Wists pages. A simple and effective application.

ShopWik - is another community based, very “web 2.0-ish” wiki, all about products. It’s a good resource for quick background and price information on a wide-range of items.

Wisheus - Simple, shared wish-lists. A nice alternative to more feature-rich sites if wish-lists are all you want.

Woot - Woot provides you with one product daily for sale, and people in the forums participate in active feedback and comparisons using the available product allowing you to make educated shopping decisions. The active community contributes to your shopping experience.

BzzAgent - BzzAgent is a program meant to initiate word-of-mouth Buzz via the delivery of free product samples to a developed list of volunteer candidates. In doing so, companies benefit from viral buzz.

Wishpot - Allows you to easily create product wish-lists and share them with the community. Wishpot allows you to add items to your list by performing either an internal site search or using the browser clipping utility. The internal site-search also happens to be powered by shopping.com, which allows for many more advanced search features, including search by price or category. Wishpot also features mobile integration which enables you to add items to your list from your cell phone, or take a snapshot of an item and add it that way, also from your mobile phone. Another features that adds value to the service is inclusion of user information for better results and recommendations.

Buzzilion - Buzzilions is a shopping review site based on reviews by “actual buyers”. It offers some great, unique features, such as Buzzilions’ Affinity Recommendations, which takes key points from your profile and matches you with other members using your product choices as a basis. Overall, Buzzilions is a viable option for consumers to begin product comparisons before buying.

Stylehive - Build your own “hive” of your favorite products and share it with the community. While it’s quite similar (and inevitably so) to many of the above, what sets it apart is its great use of item metadata and its effective use of images. For example, when a page is bookmarked, images are automatically included.

Glimpse - Glimpse is a fashion resource site for women including featured articles in addition to an active marketplace of the latest looks. With Glimpse, it’s easy to find trendy clothes and stay up to date on all the latest looks. You have the ability to save items from the marketplace into a wish-list of sorts. Those items can be sent to friends bought through the marketplace, or placed on sale alert, when you will be notified whenever the item goes on sale.

StyleFeede - An online “shopping companion” which assists you in shopping socially in real time, lets you see your “styletwins”, gives you product recommendations and allows you to build wish-lists. StyleFeeder boasts its celebrity wishlists, too, featuring the likes of 50 Cent.

ShopStyl - The more high-end of these services, ShopStyle features an active designer marketplace. Overall, a well-integrated one-stop-shop for all your designer fashions.

Reesycake - Reesycakes is yet another integrated shopping community, but with one additional feature: coupon codes. Not only that, but Reesycakes also offers great shopping guides and a comprehensive marketplace.

Osoyou- Osoyou is a women’s social-network based on shopping. Features include personalized product suggestions and other elements of social shopping. While the service hasn’t officially launched, you can still sign up and be notified when it actually does.

Travel

Amicoz.com - Amicoz is slightly different from conventional social networking sites; it doesn’t have some of the common features found on socnets. It is dedicated to assist users in sharing their travel experiences, nothing more, nothing less.

Citizenbay - Citizenbay is a user community for discovering local information.

CityTherapy - CityTherapy is an easy way to find and share places of interest (restaurant, bars) in Europe.

CouchSurfing - A global travel network connecting travelers with local communities.

fatdoor.com - A fun and an interactive way to connect with the folks from your neighborhood online.

Going.com - A fun way to interact with people locally.

iloho - An online travel community with similarity to social bookmarking services like digg.

MatchActivity - A site connecting people on the basis of their activities. Users can find things to do and join people in their area.

Matador - A travel based social network with an integrated blogging service.

myTripbook.com - myTripbook.com is a place for people who want to share their travel experiences through photos, videos and blogging with others.

OurFaves - OurFaves is a community of urban savvy folks who enjoy the Toronto city and find out cool places to hang out at.

Outside.in - A nice way to explore local communities to keep track with neighborhood news.

Rummble - Rummble enables users to discover as well as share places of interest in your neighborhood.

TravBuddy - TravBuddy is a cool site for sharing travel experiences, finding new travel friends or reading travel reviews of fellow friends.

Travellerspoint - An international meeting point for worldwide travelers.

TravelTogether - A travel based social networking service enabling users to share travel plans, travel deals and experiences.

tribe.net - Tribe.net is one of the easiest ways to connect with people for finding a restaurant, a killer apartment, a gentle dentist or a hiking friend.

TripUp - A travel community site for finding travel information and planning for trips.

Triporama- Triporama provides an easy way to plan and collaborate on group trips.

VibeAgent - VibeAgent is a site about hotel reviews, travel meta-search and social networking.

WAYN - A social networking website uniting world wide travelers.

WeExplore - WeExplore provides an online platform for volunteers and travelers from all over the globe.

Wikitravel - Wikitravel is dedicated project for creating a trusted, up-to-date travel guide. It has over 16,641 travel destination guides maintained and written by Wikitravellers from around the world.

Zoodango - Zoodango is a website enabling users to connect with urban professionals either online or face-to-face at local venues.