Five fastest growing Social networking sites

In around 10 years, Internet has become indispensable part of our life. Initially people were dependent on email service to contact their friends, relatives and colleagues. Now with the arrival of numerous social networking websites, building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others has become very simple. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services. Social networking websites have provided new ways to communicate and share information.

These days, they are being used regularly by millions of people on internet. Some of the social networking websites like Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster etc come under top 20 websites of world. They are also being used by entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to expand their contact base. One example of social networking being used for business purposes is LinkedIn.com, which aims to interconnect professionals. I am also member of all these networking sites.

Recently, comScore has reported that more people are adopting social networks worldwide. As a result, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are growing by leaps and bounds. These sites have become integral part of life of millions of internet users. According to comScore latest report, Facebook jumped from 52 million users to 132 million users from June 2007 to June 2008. The growth of MySpace is much lesser than Facebook. In 2007, MySpace counted 114 million users. In 2008 that number increased only slightly to 117.5 million for a modest growth rate of 3 percent.

Hi5 has grown by 100 percent from 2007 to 2008, going from 28 million users to over 56 million whereas Friendster has reported the growth by 50 percent from 24 million to 37 million users. Google’s social networking site Orkut has also registered good growth with its user base increased from 24 million users to 34 million, that is 41 percent growth. Facebook is the fastest growing social networking website with Hi5 on second place.