Women's Social Networking

What is Social Networking?

If you're new to the Internet or just haven't done a lot of looking around at different social sites, you might not understand about social networking.

Social networking Web sites connect people with common interests and friends. For instance the social networking site MySpace allows different people to become "friends" on the site. When you are someone's friend, you can see all of their friends, and their friends can see your friends.

This makes it easy to communicate with different people who you may not know but who have some connection to one of your friends. It's like a giant cocktail party, except you get to choose with whom you want to mingle.

Women's social networking takes the idea of the social network a step further by linking up women with common interests, whether that interest is starting a business, raising a family or sharing craft tips and information.

Finding Women's Social Networking Sites

There are many different women's social networking sites that you can easily find online by searching women's social networking and any key phrase that might indicate the kind of group you're looking for such as moms, business owners, college students, etc.

Or you can check out the following list of some of the most popular networking sites for women:

• Sister Woman is a site dedicated to allowing women over 21 to share their wisdom and feelings with each other. Sign-up is free, and you can post blog entries, find new friends, join "circles" and groups, post photos and more.
• Oomphers looks more like a message board than a traditional social networking site, but it also has groups that people can join. Post your thoughts, respond to others, add photos or videos, and chat in the forum.
• Whole Women provides a way for older women (whose children aren't still connected to their hips, as the site says) a chance to find each other and communicate about news, politics, hobbies and other issues.
• CafeMom is a social networking site for mothers run by the people who brought you ClubMom. It offers groups for moms who want to talk about particular issues, blog sites and more.
• Team Sugar is a lively site dedicated to fashion, gossip, shopping, recipes and more. It's a huge social network that allows for blogging, chatting, posting pictures and rating other people's content.
• Mathapedia looks a lot like any other Martha Stewart blog, but it aims to become a social networking site for women who want to share information about crafts, cooking, housekeeping and other good things.

Getting the Most from Social Networking

Social networking can be a lot of fun, but it can also be a big time drain if you don't have goals and priorities for what you actually want to get out of the networking opportunity.

For instance if you're just looking for friends with whom you can commiserate about your life, you'll approach social networking a lot differently than someone who is looking for a business partner or advice about parenting.

Shop around a bit and see what the different sites have to offer before you choose one. Of course you can always sign up for several and then only ever use the one that you find most useful, but it's better if you can pick the one you think you'll like most and only sign up for that network.

If you have friends who are already involved in social networking, ask them for recommendations. It's always good if you can have one "real life" friend in your network to give you pointers and show you the ropes.

Have fun! Social networking allows people to communicate with each other who never would have found each other any other way. Whether you're using social networking for a fun or serious purpose, it's still pretty amazing that this is even possible.