Social Networking: Tagged.com

When it comes to social networking, the first two sites I think of are Facebook and Myspace. Although know Myspace has pretty much died off, besides it's music pages, and Facebook has taken over the market of social networking. There are still many other sites that try and be the same or different from Facebook to try and get people to join their site. Tagged.com is one of those sites that is trying to stay apart from Facebook, stating as a slogan, "Tagged: a different kind of social network." But is it really different from the big dogs?

Mission: Tagged
Tagged tries to differentiate itself from Facebook and other SNSs by stating, "Other social networks are for staying in touch with people you already know. At Tagged, we make it easy to meet new people." Their overall goal seems to not stay in touch with old friends, but to make new ones either platonic or not. "Tagged is the place where people can discover hundreds of new friends or just meet that special someone." They say you can do this through their "social games, friend suggestions, browse profiles, group interests, and much more." So the overview of their site is to meet new friends or to meet that special someone, not so much keeping in contact with old friends.

Interaction
To keep you interacting with the site you can upload photos, videos, play games, and browse strangers profiles. You can also give out "luv" to friends of yours. Which you get three of every day. There is a "luv meter" to show you how much luv you've recieved from your friends. In the instructions of this it states, "Give Luv and get Luv to increase your Luv Meter! And since I am a new member to the site, looks like I have no luv.

Along with luv, you can also give gifts to your friends. But it will cost you....gold. There is a system on the site, and instead of money as your balance, it is measured in gold. But the gold isn't real gold of course, it is just the word they gave to points basically. And how do you earn gold? You buy it! Either through opening up a new checking account as HSBC, or starting a new account of Netflix. Or you may just pay for gold:

This seems to be one of the many ways the site makes money. The site boasts, "Over the years Tagged has grown to be one of the largest social networks in the world and among the most successful too." But besides luv and Gold, the site has many other features for you to meet friends or lovers. They encourage you to join groups as a good way to meet new people, along with games. This is a way to meet people with common interests that you may be compatible with. Groups range from animals to sports, and the games range from Farm (much like Facebook's Farmville) to poker.

Overall the site tries very hard to give you every option possible for meeting new people. Although they do leave it in your hands to meet someone new, they give you many venues to meet different people. You can meet people through photos, gifts, games, groups, common interests, or just searching for people named Henry. Either way it would be hard not to meet people on here, since they give you multiple venues to do so. Is it a successful venture? According to them it is, but I'm not sure how useful the site is. It seems that many people are using it, somewhere around 80 million members, so it would be hard not to make new internet friends/significant others on the site.