NEWS: Social Networking Awards - Nominations Open!

News/Social Networks/Awards/Peter Cashmore
Found on: mashable.com

With over 412K subscribed readers, Peter Cashmore is one of the most read and influential bloggers in the world. Peter's blog "Mashable.com" is primarily a blog dedicated to what Peter refers to as "social networking 2.o"; Mashable is a must read for anyone looking for news on the newest and most innovating social networking sites.

That said, Peter announced on Saturday, that Mashable along with sponsors "Photobucket" are now accepting nominations for the first annual Social Networking Awards -- congrats Peter!!

Mashable post:

I wanted to save this up for Monday, but we thought we’d give you some extra time over the weekend for nominations. First up, many thanks to Photobucket for offering to sponsor the Social Networking Awards 2006, which will run from now until the end of next week. The winners will be announced late on Thursday, December 21st (which for some of you will be Friday morning).

A few notes to begin. The Awards are not specifically for social networks launched in 2006 - there are sites launched years ago that have made big strides this year (StumbleUpon, for instance). Also note that networks certainly don’t need to be US-based, but they should be open to registration from anywhere in the world and should have an English version available. Obviously, the nominees don’t need to have been mentioned on Mashable, since I’m sure we’ve missed plenty of good ones. You can nominate your favorite sites in the following categories. To nominate a site, put the site name and category in the comments. Alternatively, you can write a post on your own blog and trackback or link to this post. You can nominate one site in each of the twelve categories. Voting will begin on Monday night and continue until Thursday night.

1. Large Scale

This is for social networks with more than 500,000 users. That would include MySpace, Friendster, Multiply, hi5, Piczo, Tagworld, Bebo, Tagged, Orkut, Xanga, Facebook and many more. How is a social network defined? At the very least, these sites should have profile pages with the ability to add friends. If you need inspiration, Wikipedia has a good list of large social networking sites. Since there isn’t a huge number of small-scale business networks (apart from Ecademy, perhaps), LinkedIn and Xing will be eligible. Ryze would probably make the cut, too.

2. Widgets and Add-ons

This category is for companies that provide tools for blogs and social networks. Examples include Stickam, Slide.com and MyBlogLog. Photo hosting sites like Imageshack are not in this category. However, avatar services like Meez are eligible. And since we don’t have a specific category for instant messaging, we’ll include Plugoo, MeeboMe and other IM tools that can be embedded in web pages.