Flirtomatic is a social networking website based in Soho, London, UK that sets itself apart from other such sites through its cross-platform strategy. As of Valentine’s Day, 2007, the total registered user base was 265,000 and is growing at around 20,000 users per month. In June 2007, the company received £2m in funding to finance expansion into international mobile networking markets.
Users have the opportunity to meet new people and make friends within the context of a flirting environment. Features include an online chat facility, personal profiles, photos, and videos. …

OkCupid is a free-of-charge social networking and dating website, which also offers features including user-generated content such as blogging and member-created quizzes.
OkCupid users are presented with questions (most of which are authored, submitted, and vetted by members) about various topics such as politics and tastes page by page, and given a list of up to four answers per question to choose from. They are also asked “How would your Ideal Match answer this question?”, and then “How important is their answer to you?”, with degrees of importance for the …

Drop.io is an online file hosting and sharing service that is designed to be simple and emphasizes privacy. It allows users to create online sharing points called “drops” that are used for uploading and sharing documents, images, video, audio, and other digital content without accounts, registration or e-mail addresses. Drops are non-searchable and not networked.

Since 2005, Socialcast has been a leading provider of social networking platforms and solutions for both consumer-facing clients and enterprise customers. Based in Irvine, California, Socialcast is the only SaaS provider of self-service corporate social networking communities. Our software unites traditional intranet features with social messaging technology to empower employees to expand, create and share knowledge across the enterprise.

Yelp combines local reviews and social networking functionality to create a local online community. Adding social web functionality to user reviews creates a de-facto reputation system, whereby site visitors can see which contributing users are the most popular, respected, and prolific, how long each has been a member, and which have interests similar to theirs. Strong peer feedback mechanisms and the featured placement of popular reviews on the site and in local newsletters help motivate contributors. Yelp also applies a “First to Review” reward system to create a competition …

The 2008 Crunchies is an annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. here’s the list of winners and the finalists.

A collection of Favorite startups and products for 2009 by Michael Arrington, it also shows a list from previous years…
From TechCrunch
At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this – previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies – this list is all mine…

Base on ComScore traffic stats for November 2008, ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

FriendFeed is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. Users can use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends.
Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members’ social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track …

OneSeason.com, an online sports entertainment company, today unveiled the first sports trading platform in the United States that uses real money. Created by sports fans, for sports fans, OneSeason.com enables users to compete, interact and have a vested interest in their passion. Users showcase their sports knowledge by acquiring and trading virtual shares of their favorite players, teams and leagues realizing market returns based on their skill.
On OneSeason.com users build a “Sportfolio” as they trade shares, called Synthetic Ownership Interests (SOIs), via a free market system that is driven …