Social Networking sites like Facebook, Orkut and many others where you find people from different parts of world, different age. You can meet new people who could be of your interest, discuss on topics which are of common interest. You can also meet your old lost friends after long time and refresh your golden memories.
Here comes an unique Social Networking site called Verdurez, which is not for people like me, but for Indian aged above 55. You can register at this site for free and start making friends. You may be able to meet your old friends with whom you are not in touch or you don’t know where he or she is. This reminds me of meeting my classmates whom I was not in touch for more than 20 years through classmates.com.
This site is promoted by Ishita Sukhadwala, who has dedicated this site to her parents.

The name Verdurez  has been chosen from the noun verdure which means greenness, especially of fresh, flourishing vegetation, freshness in general; flourishing condition; vigour. We passionately believe that life doesn’t come to a slow grinding halt as you get older. Au contraire, a new phase in life begins which can flourish with vigour and freshness.

The concept looks good, but my worry is how many Indians at this age group in India use computers and Internet. There are many literate people in this age group (above 55) but they do not use computers as during their college time or when they were at job, there were no computers used.
I feel the concept is very good and it should be promoted. We need our elder generation to sit at home and know and enjoy the advantages of getting connected online through such social networking sites. They can get into group discussions, debates, share their knowledge and get to know more and more people of their age.

I was just Googling and got through a site which gives all the information related to twitter accounts. The site is called tweetrush. I was  really surprised to see the top tweeter who does an average tweet of 1349 tweet a day and has done 129,474 tweets since July 19th 2008.

I guess this user does nothing other than tweeting or has some automated system to do it. How many tweets do you do a day? You can also check your stats by visiting http://tweetrush.com/Yourusername

The stats includes information like the last 7 days usage, total number of tweets, and your average use per day.

Follow me on Twitter

Twellow is a new Twitter search engine which grabs public messages from Twitter, analyze and categorize every user who posts those messages. By categorizing the users, twellow enables to provide better searches according to the categories.

You can get listed in Twellow by filling up this form. You can also change your category by editing your profile using the profile editor. You should have a twitter account and you should disable your update protection for Twellow to add you and categorize. Twellow is not a property of twitter, they use either using the API or public feeds.

If you are looking to develop a social networking site, then I can suggest you Wordpress MU, which is multi-user wordpress installation. Wordpress MU is used for portals like Wordpress.Com where every blog is created as a sub-domain.

You need another tool with Wordpress MU to complete the Social networking site and its called BuddyPress.

BuddyPress

• BuddyPress adds the following features for your Wordpress MU installation
• Profiles
• Friends
• Messaging
• Blog
• Status
• Wire
• Photo Albums

You can find the detailed information here. You can find information related to installing Wordpress MU here. You can opt for creating a sub-domain or a directory style for each user.

Today I have added the Gigya Widget to my blog here which you can find under every post on Single pages. I was just playing with this widget and found it to be very useful. There services available includes the Wildfire widget through which you can add a widget to your post pages which can be used to submit your posts to different bookmarking sites, post to other blogs, email to their friends. Users can get their contacts imported from their email accounts like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. I tried some test emails and posts and works great.

The image shown below is from this blog which is active now and you can try it. Just go to an individual post and you will find this below the post.

Its very simple to install, just need to add some bit of code to your blog header and the single post file in the templates. Before grabbing the code, you can customize the widget according to your taste and the template of your blog.

Earning from Gigya Widget

Gigya also has an earning program which is free to join, but need to apply for this program. I am not much aware of this program as I have not tried. If anyone has used it, please share your thoughts.

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I was doing some research on Social Networking Traffic like from Stumbleupon or Digg. Couple of my pages were submitted to Stumbleupon and my traffic really boomed up unexpectedly. I was going through the Google Analytics reports and studying the quality of the Traffic.

What does quality of the traffic means?

Suppose I get a visitor from SU (StumbleUpon) or digg, I found that the visitor hardly spent less than a minute on my website and hardly visited 2-3 pages of my blog. But when I look into a visitor who has come directly to my blog spends 20 minutes and visits about 10-20 pages. I did some googling on this subject and found lots of interesting articles by experts.

Some say even the traffic from search engines are of low quality as they just come to your page and see if they get what they want or just continue with other search results. Looking into this opinion I would like to say is if you have good quality content, the visitor may get impressed and go through other pages and even subscribe to your blog feeds. I usually do this.

My opinion for getting loyal visitors for you blog is to create content which will be useful for your readers and they bookmark your site or link to your posts. I do always link to posts and blogs I like and give the credit to the author. I was reading a post at SEOBOOK which gives some very useful information about the quality of Social Network Traffic

In a post at RandomJabber, the author has described why the social networking traffic sucks. He also feels that the quality of the traffic is very low and of no use for the blog rather than wasting the bandwidth.

One more thing I noticed with Social Networking traffic is the ups and downs in my traffic graph. One fine day, my traffic grows more than 500% and the very next day, it comes back to the same old position. If you do not have a dedicated server, you will even get notice from your hosting company as you may exceed the bandwidth limit. Some sites are down due to such traffic. I would like to recommend this post to be read which is about the results of digging an article called the digg effect

How can a Social Networking Traffic be useful?

If you are selling ads on the basis of impressions then such traffic can be useful for you. Social Networking sites gives you lots of hits, but the conversion or the quality will not be good as I mentioned above. You can sell ads on your blog on the basis of impressions and show your stats to your visitors. My concern about the advertisers is, if they are not happy with the results of the ad campaigns will they renew the purchase? If they are not happy with the CTR or CPA, then they may not be renewing the advertising campaigns. Again the other possibility is that you may get new advertisers who may want to try your advertising program without knowing the results and may use for a month and again they may not be happy with your advertising programs.

My Opinion

• Concentrate of creating good content
• Try to best to provide what your visitors expect from your blog
• Don’t take Social networking traffic as a good growth.
• Track your growth using Google Analytics which will clearly explain you the quality of your traffic