These days I’ve just been bombarded with new sites for every imaginable aspect of web 2.0. Many are overlapping in services, which makes it hard for me to figure out what I should actually try. As I found a few days ago, I’m actually quite an early adopter, though I never considered myself that before. I never realized that all the sites I’ve started to use are so new and foreign to most of my friends. I have discovered that I’ve been using sites that many of them have never heard of and that most of them don’t have accounts on. When I share them with friends, the ones I like best I often convey in such a way that they want to join too. This ranges from Baseloop to Google Wave to Swagbucks. There are so many choices out there that I don’t know what to use anymore.
Let’s take sharing pictures, for example. There’s Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and many more that focus more on printing photos. Facebook is useful because you can tag your friends and use the existing social network to share your photos. Flickr is good to share your stuff with the world and make your pictures show up on image searches. Picasa has a fun face recognition algorithm that allows you to have people pre-tagged whenever you upload new pictures. Those people are also linked to your Google contacts, so if you already use one of the other Google services (Gmail, Voice, Wave), you can use existing contacts to tag, much like Facebook. So when you want to share pictures, where do you go?!
Now let’s say you want to plan an event. Facebook comes in as a contender once again, as does Google with its new Wave. Then there’s the up-and-coming Baseloop fully intended to cater to this need. For Facebook, the edge in this area is once again the existing network you have on there. Most of my friends are on there and I can easily invite them (or one of my groups) to an event I create. Wave’s biggest setback at the moment is the lack of people using it. I’ve finally got more than 5 people on there, but it’s still a long ways to be able to invite all of my friends to something through Wave. I do like how you can embed a map of the location, include the weather for that day, and other nifty features that would be useful. 
Finally, Baseloop caters to both events for your friends and more public events. What I like best about them is they allow you to suggest things to do and they show you a public calendar of events going on in your area. That way, if you’ve wanted to do something but could never seem to find the people to do it with, you can put it out there for all your friends (and even random people) to see. Much easier than e-mailing or messaging all my friends just to see if they’re interested in a particular activity. You can also quickly see what things there might be to do on a Saturday night when you’re bored and want to go have some fun. But of course, few people are on it now, so when I invite friends, they’d need to set up an account. So which of these is best for event-planning?
Similar issues arise for just choosing a social network. There’s Facebook, Baseloop, Plaxo, Brazen Careerist, Ning, MySpace, Hi5… Then for blogging or micro-blogging there’s WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, Livejournal, Xanga, Plurk… Even video posting and interaction has a wide selection with YouTube, Vimeo, Tokbox, Stroome, Nurphy… Plus search engines, like Google, Yahoo, Bing (ok technically a “decision engine,” but you get the idea), Ask, Swagbucks, Goodsearch… Let’s not even get into the online shopping sites, mapping and direction sites, online game sites, dating sites, etc.!
Aaaah! It’s overwhelming and there are still more sites like this popping up ALL THE TIME. I suppose that’s what happens when it’s relatively easy for people to start online businesses. You have little startup cost beyond the website itself and whatever you need to do to create and maintain it. The only physical stuff you really need is computers and computing power. Beyond that, it’s all your programming skills, creativity, and customer service put to the test.
