Facebook, arguably the most talked about social networking site, is growing at an average of 250 000 members per day and has reached almost 50 million users. While these statistics are impressive, the site is far from being the biggest. MySpace has over 200 million users while Google’s orkut boasts 68 million. On the other end of the spectrum, a number of smaller social networks have emerged catering to specific interests and needs of niche groups. There is a mix of country specific communities such as Cyworld in Korea, Grono.net in Poland and Mixi in Japan. Networks such as Care2 and TakingITGlobal are communities for social activists. LinkedIn, XING and Ryze have special tools to facilitate interactions between business people. There are event networks, created by LifeAt, to connect people living in the same building.

The logic for a one stop shop in social networking is compelling. Creating and maintaining multiple profiles on different sites is overly time consuming. However, as more people begin to integrate social networks into their everyday life, the demand will grow for specialized tools and applications provided by the niche players. In order to create these, Facebook has opened up their platform to external developers. This has resulted in over 5 000 applications, however, the majority are simple utilities and widgets that allow people to express themselves or play games.

The logical solution would be for Facebook to partner or acquire other social networks to bring their more sophisticated tools as well as users under one umbrella. While this might make sense for Facebook, there will be resistance from users. Combining or integrating user profiles would limit the types of online interactions users might want to have for fear of the wrong person finding out – you don’t want your boss to know that you spike trees on the weekend or ride with a biker gang. Managing multiple Facebook identities is already becoming tricky – think of having your work colleagues as friends alongside your old frat house buddies.

To date, no major mergers and acquisitions between social networking sites have taken place. As such, it is difficult to tell what the impact on users would be. Facebook could test the waters by acquiring one of the smaller players – say CarDomain, a community of car enthusiasts or Buzznet which is a set of communities around music and pop-culture. Whichever way Facebook chooses to grow and develop their services it will be important to give users more granular control over their interactions with the communities they belong to.