Google's Follow Finder helps you find Twitter users who might interest you using the list of people you're already connected with.

Twitter — just like most social networks — becomes more useful as you connect with more users. But finding those users can be tough for a newbie.

Other social networks have created tools that automatically generate lists of users to connect with based on a user’s habits, but Twitter has yet to generate a similar tool.

Google’s Follow Finder, launched in April, attempts to tackle this problem. The service works by analyzing the Twitter users you’re already connected with against the people other Twitter users are connected with, and attempts to find similarties.

A company representative explained how the tool works in the official Google Blog: “The lists in Google Follow Finder are generated using public following and follower lists on Twitter. For example, if you follow CNN and the New York Times on Twitter, and most people who follow CNN and the New York Times also tend to follow TIME, we’ll suggest TIME as a ‘Tweep you might like.’”

as of April 16, according to the foundation’s website, which manages several Wiki sites including Wikipedia.

for Farmville, the most popular game on Facebook, according to April 16 statistics from All Facebook, a site devoted to coverage of the social network.

Twitterfeed automatically pipes a site's RSS feed to Twitter and Facebook.

Updating multiple social media accounts can be time-consuming. One way to cut down on time spent managing social media presences it to automatically post content from another website.

TwitterFeed is a free service that allows you to send headlines from a website or blog directly to Twitter or Facebook using the site’s RSS feed (if you’re unfamiliar with RSS, visit WhatIsRSS.com).

It’s by no means a replacement for having a real person manage social media accounts and handle interactions, but can save time.

The site can also provide information on click-through rates and other useful metrics.

The typical MySpace profile is accented with flashy graphics and bright colors while Facebook pages are more formulaic and share the site's standard fonts and white background.

In front of a packed audience in a New York City auditorium, researcher Danah Boyd posed a question. She asked the roomful of political junkies, activists and tech aficionados at the annual Personal Democracy Forum how many were on Facebook. Almost all raised their hands. Then she repeated the question, instead asking about MySpace. Almost no hands. At the time of her lecture, though, the two sites were almost tied in traffic. (Watch the speech here, read the transcript here.)

Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was using the exercise to illustrate an often unnoticed but important invisible barrier that, according to some researchers, separates the two biggest social networks — education level, class and sometimes even race. It’s a barrier that’s crucial to understand for professional communicators who are trying to distribute messages to broad audiences using new technology.

Danah Boyd

In fact, some sociologists, including Boyd, have argued that social networks, designed to promote unity and collaboration, are equally suited to promote the opposite. Knowing where these invisible barriers lie can be difficult because the networks don’t collect such information. And even anecdotal observations can be ineffective because most perceptions of a social network are gathered from within one’s own social circle.

MySpace and Facebook both allow users to create profiles and list virtual “friends”, join “groups” that often promote a common cause or belief, and post picture and videos for other members to view. MySpace, however, allows users great control over the appearance of their pages, from the music that plays to colors to fonts. This has helped make the site more popular with certain ethnic groups, some argue, but also alienates users who are averse to the busy pages. Facebook profiles are more nondescript with information filed away in standardized fields on the same white background with the same font across the whole network. Many businesses also have “pages” on Facebook, while musicians and nightclubs are likely to be found on MySpace. Facebook and MySpace are still by far the two largest social networks. Last week’s post covered other more specialized social networks on niche topics.

S. Craig Watkins, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Young and The Digital, observed some of these divisions during a multi-year research project on media use by young people for his book. For example, he observed that users of Facebook tended to be college students or college-educated and that making the switch from MySpace often happened as users started their college educations.

S. Craig Watkins

“Facebook, frankly put, has become a way for young collegians to get away from users of social network sites they believe are unsophisticated, uneducated, and undesirable,” Watkins wrote.

He also observed that regular users of social networks had distinct thoughts on what each network was like — feelings that may be unnoticed by the casual user. MySpace was considered crowded, trashy, creepy, and for the uneducated and immature. Facebook, on the other hand, was selective, clean, trustworthy and for the educated and mature. Boyd had similar findings.

Additionally, 2009 figures from Northwestern University’s Web Use Project indicate that in the last two years the social makeup of the two sites is becoming even more different. See that data here.

These differences may not even be apparent to some users, who only care about being able to connect with their real-life social network online. Understanding the composition of the various networks, however, is important for communications professionals. It’s possible that a college-educated communicator is unlikely to have a presence on the same network as half of the people he or she is trying to reach. The same goes for many organizations. Some say that’s no different than offline life.

Eszter Hargittai

“The membership of certain online communities mirrors people’s social networks in their everyday lives,” Northwestern University’s Eszter Hargittai wrote in a 2007 study. “Thus online actions and interactions cannot be seen as tabula rasa activities, independent of existing offline identities.”

Because of that, it all comes down to simply understanding the differences between different networks, what the strengths and weaknesses of each are, and how each network extends interactions that already take place offline. Communicators will ultimately have to understand that posting to one of the large social networks doesn’t always mean reaching the entire world of social network users. Even though many have presences on multiple networks, studies such as Hargittai’s show that the networks are very distinct publics.

As social networks evolve, will these divisions become more pronounced? Does it make sense for organizations to maintain presences on multiple networks at the expense of the extra time it takes to maintain those presences? Will users begin to maintain multiple profiles in multiple places (many already do) to keep up with the growing differences between networks?

according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That’s compared to 22% for Facebook.

according to research from Nielsen.

Ning provides a free platform you can use to launch your own social network.

So after all this talk about social networks, what if you’re interested in starting your own? Ning is the place to go. There are already more than 1.5 million social networks on the site on a wide variety of topics.

The site can be useful for both internal and external collaboration. People have launched social networks to aggregate information during hurricanes and other crises but organizations also have pages on the site to facilitate communication within their groups. There are also many information-packed social networks on Ning that cover topics relevant to communications professionals.

The value of a social network is defined not only by who’s on it, but by who’s excluded.

— Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley analyst, in an interview with The Economist

Many of these networks are for-profit undertakings much like the major social networks. But others are marketer-driven networks launched by companies to promote their brands and cater to their most loyal users.

These networks facilitate collaboration among groups that was previously difficult or impossible by gathering hyper-engaged aficionados together using the Internet, overcoming previously prohibitive geographic barriers.

The major social networks have features built-in that allow users to self-segment and gather into groups already. That’s nothing new. And brands can create pages and personas on most of the popular social networks that can allow users to connect around their brands.

Niche social networks, however, are custom-built to meet the specific needs of users in the communities they aim to attract. Take BakeSpace, a site for cooks, as an example. BakeSpace has features that facilitate easy recipe-swapping, and allows members to “follow” other members to see what they’re friends on the site are cooking for each meal.

Sites like BakeSpace have sprung up for just about every topic. There’s ASmallWorld for high rollers, Pet Crash for pet lovers, SuperGlued for concertgoers, Birdpost for birdwatchers, the list goes on. In news, the New York Times is experimenting with TimesPeople and BusinessWeek is experimenting with Business Exchange. Check out this database for an idea of what is out there.

Because these networks are so focused they’re also going after a different type of advertising, often at a higher price. For 2009, 28.2% of the ad spending on social networking is expected to be outside of the big two social networks. Some say that’s because niche networks are able to target advertisements with much more certainty than the big social networks are.

While Facebook can employ a user’s location or age to target advertisements, niche social networks are able to provide ad buyers with users who have specifically defined interests. And other targeting methods, such as behavioral targeting, which tracks users and targets them based on their online activity, has drawn ire from the Federal Trade Commission because of privacy concerns.

That is just increasing the push to these “niche” or “vertical” social networks for some advertisers.

“Companies are learning that these smaller communities may reach people that are more valuable to their brands,” Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research, told the Washington Post. “It will someday feel more like information than marketing.”

Some, however, such as eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson, have wondered about the long-term viability of many of these platforms. That’s partially being blamed on increased consumer usage of social networks, without advertising dollars to match in the down economy.

“With US ad revenue growth slowing, smaller and niche social networks will have a tough time gaining traction and several may close up shop or be acquired by larger players,” Williamson wrote. “In addition, marketers that have built standalone social networks tied to their brands will either close them or migrate them to existing social network platforms where they can reach a broader audience.”

However niche networks evolve they’re an important trend to watch for anyone in advertising or marketing. With that in mind, there are several unanswered questions about the future of the networks. Is niche social networking a fad or will they continue to pop up as deploying social networks becomes easier and cheaper? Will these social networks ever get into the content-creation business, stepping into the space of legacy specialty and trade publications? Will the major social networks simply evolve as a place to aggregate a user’s online persona, with most of the collaboration taking place on niche sites? And should content producers (including news organizations) consider increasing the social nature of their sites to accommodate that interaction?