For those people who do not want to support Murdoch or mix with teens, what are the alternatives to MySpace? David J Jones
The two generic services are Microsoft's Live Spaces (http://spaces.live.com/), which is huge, and Yahoo's 360 (http://360.yahoo.com/), which isn't.
Most other alternatives to MySpace tend to focus on a particular group or geographical area, whether intentionally or not. Facebook, for example, started in universities and colleges, LinkedIn is aimed at business contacts and ShoutLife is family-friendly and "Christian owned and operated". Cyworld is big in Korea, Bebo in the UK, and Google's Orkut in Brazil. The fast-growing hi5.com developed a strong African-American following and is now picking up users worldwide.
Wikipedia has an incomplete list of sites at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites, where you might find something you like.
One of the main functions of social networking sites is to get to know other people with similar interests. However, if you really want to share things with an existing group of friends, you'd probably be better off with an earlier approach, known as groups. This idea was pioneered by sites like eGroups, which was founded to host mailing lists. eGroups was bought by Yahoo in 2000 and turned into Yahoo Groups. Its main rival is Microsoft's MSN Groups. (Google Groups is just Usenet, which is not the same thing at all.)
Groups generally allow users to share messages, emails, photos and perhaps small files, but they don't provide blog space. If you start a group you can make it "invitation only" or publicise it and let anyone join. Groups aren't trendy any more but they still have more users in total than most social networking sites.
