Five social sites you don't know about, but should
Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 10:21AM 
I've recently been thinking of upgrading to a larger business card just so I can include all the different digital addresses I have piling up. This is where SocialURL comes in handy. SocialURL lets you aggregate your entire digital presence (social and otherwise) in one neat and compact URL. Check out my SocialURL site here.
A combination of Wikipedia and Flickr, Fotopedia's mission is to build "a photo encyclopedia that lets photographers and photo enthusiasts collaborate and enrich images to be useful for the whole world wide web." The result is an amazing collection of high quality photographs.
In its simplest form, Quora is a question and answer site that adds the trappings of social media. We've talked about Quora on The Duffy Agency blog before. As we stated then, Quora can be somewhat addictive since you can seemingly find or receive answers to almost any question. But Quora's most appealing feature is the ability to follow not only people (à la Twitter), but also to follow topics.
SocialVibe uses the power of your social network to raise money for causes that are important to you. With SocialVibe you create a profile, choose a cause that is important to you, find a sponsor and then perform "branded activities" which earns you points. In return, those points are monetized and money gets donated to your cause. You, and the people who support your cause, never actually donate money. What you donate is your time to perform the "branded activities." You can also post a badge to MySpace and blogs, or add the Facebook app to help encourage your friends to support your cause.
I've saved this one for last since I think it is probably my favorite "unknown" social site. Kickstarter describes themselves as "the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world." And they may be right. It's an easy concept really. Basically you create a video that describes your project and ask people for their support. You are not investing or lending money with this service. The creator retains 100% of the ownership. Instead, the creator usually offers something (but they are not obligated to) in return for financial support. For example, filmmakers might offer a copy of the finished film for providing a donation. Others have used the donation process as a way for people to pre-order the product they are trying to get funds to develop.
But the question is: Does it work? Depends on the idea. And in the case of the TikTok+LunaTik Multi-Touch Watch Kits , who raised over $900K and exceeded their fundraising goal by 6283%, I'm sure they would say that Kickstarter works just fine.
What sites did we miss? What are sites that you know about that others might not have heard of yet? Let us know in our comments section.
Kevin Duffy is the Creative Director for The Duffy Agency's Boston office.
Reader Comments (2)
I like them better than the SocialURL one just because I think these two sites have a nicer design.