Social-networking news bits

There is so much social-networking news these days that I thought you might prefer them in a collection of little bytes:

Extended families may be interested in social networking specifically for them. Two examples written up in AppScout are Famster.com and TheFamilyPost.com, where families can share photos privately (CNET has a video about Famster).

University students may be interested in TheCollegeLife.com, an alternative to Facebook, the No. 2 social-networking site (after MySpace). According to this reporter at DePaul University's newspaper, "on a College Life profile, rather than one extended page, there is a series of tabs that each hold a different category: profile, blog, photos, favorites, event calendar and a completely new category: the wishlist."

Parents worldwide may be interested in what this mom in Oz says about teen self-exposure in blogs (she chooses not to read her daughter's): "They're doing exactly what we did at their age, even if we did it through physical space - the telephone and the diary. But what's shocking to us is the extent of self-exposure they embrace. These kids live their lives online, but to their parents it feels like public nudity." Don't miss her whole thoughtful commentary in the Sydney Morning Herald.

As for the numbers: Agence France Presse reports that "visits to social-networking websites climbed 11.5% February with big surges in popularity seen in smaller players." Traffic to MySpace, which got 80% of social-networking visits, rose 10.2% and to Facebook, 9.1%. Visits to Buzznet and iMeem (which each had less than 1% of social-networking traffic in February), more than doubled, AFP cited Hitwise as saying.