Is it really the holiday already? Not quite – we’ve still got to announce the Social Networking Awards 2006! With thousands of votes cast, the People’s Choice attracted a much bigger response than anyone expected. Meanwhile, we agonized over which companies to pick as Mashable’s choices (the “Judge’s Choice”).  For those who are interested, our picks were made by Mashable, Mashable Labs and Advantage Consulting Services, the team that oversees social network consulting for our clients, in addition to recommending the best partners and white label social networks. The ACS team also has a background in web development (they were behind the stats service CrazyEgg, for instance), but they don’t have any competing services in the social networking space. Our criteria were: Growth and Momentum; Design and Usability; Uniqueness/Innovation. There are two winners in each category, followed by the sites that are “Hot for 2007″ – a combination of your votes and our picks.  A note on voting: most of you stuck to the rules when it came to voting, and we made exceptions in the rare instances where users accidentally voted twice (the second vote was excluded). However, one company repeatedly attempted to submit scores of votes from a handful of IP addresses – in accordance with the rules, this company has been excluded from the competition. Voting was closed at around 6PM PDT on Saturday – any votes received after that time were not counted.  Hot for 2007: Bebo, Vox, Facebook, Facebox  You can say what you like about MySpace – horrible code, ugly design, a failure to embrace outside developers – but the users don’t seem to care. With over 140 million accounts (not all active, admittedly), MySpace has become a cultural phenomenon. The site’s standout feature is the freedom it provides to users – you can add slideshows, pictures, custom designs and much more. MySpace is also the number one destination online for upcoming bands, and their plan to sell music from these bands next year is surely set to reshape the music industry. We see MySpace as the new MTV, with one crucial difference: the users are the stars. With a MySpace page, anyone can be a celebrity, creating an online image that’s sometimes an alter-ego to their true personality. In the coming year, MySpace plans to expand to the massive Chinese market (see MySpace China). We’re not convinced that they can stand up to local competition, but we’re keen to find out.  Meanwhile, we think Bebo is the most “exciting” social network right now. With a massive user base and a site that actually works, we think they’ll grow rapidly in 2007.  We like Multiply, and so do Multiply’s dedicated users. A small post about the Social Networking Awards on the Multiply blog resulted in a landslide win for the social network, which emphasizes networking with real friends. We’ve expressed concerns in the past that this “closed” model may slow their growth, but we also feel that it differentiates Multiply from the hordes of MySpace clones. That said, Multiply now has a major competitor. Vox, which came second in terms of votes despite the lack of coaxing by the Vox team, is an outstanding blog platform. We were bowled over by it when it launched in October, and if we had a “hosted blogs” category, we would have chosen Vox.  So how about the other nominees? Facebook might not be the most popular among our readership, but the majority of college students consider it to be an essential tool. However, we’re a little less optimistic about Facebook than we were at the start of the year: now that acquisition talks with Yahoo are off the cards, they may need to go it alone, while the Facebook news feed and the decision to open up the site were risky choices that may or may not pay off. Some are saying that Facebook is set for exponential growth now they allow everybody to join. Others, meanwhile, think they may be the next Friendster – overconfident, and unwilling to listen to their users. That said, Facebook users have no alternative site to defect to – we think that Facebook will continue to grow strongly in 2007.  We also noticed a tongue-in-cheek vote for Walmart’s “School Your Way” site (technically called “The Hub”), which we found hilarious – Walmart’s failed attempt at social networking was a classic example of how to do everything wrong.  Hot for 2007: RockYou, Stickam, Snocap, Zingfu, MyBlogLog  Slide.com and RockYou have been the most talked-about widgets this year, with Slide.com gaining a little more traction with the MySpace set. Both are impressive products which give users the freedom to express themselves. Even the launch of MySpace’s own service, MySpace slideshows, didn’t put a dent in the popularity of these two slideshow tools. Zingfu, another one of our favorites this year, has also achieved success by allowing users to create funny images of themselves and their friends. Meanwhile, we think Stickam‘s live webcams are a killer idea, and the service will be a big success. We’re also hopeful that MyBlogLog, a service that helps communities to form around blogs, will successfully expand to the mainstream in 2007 – they added support for MySpace only a few weeks ago, and we think that could be crucial.  The popular vote, meanwhile, went to Zwinky. The avatar service has a huge, dedicated user base consisting largely of teens. In our original review, we said that Zwinky “will probably be a massive viral success despite a lack of interest from the geek elite”. We stand by that claim going into 2007.  Hot for 2007: Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Blinklist  As the site that defined social news as we know it, we had no hesitation in choosing Digg as our pick in this category. Digg’s ability to send massive amounts of traffic to any site became legendary, while it has largely eclipsed Slashdot as the hot hangout for tech addicts. We’ve yet to see whether the site’s expansion beyond technology will succeed, but we still feel that Digg‘s contribution to the social space has been vital. Meanwhile del.icio.us, the undisputed leader of social bookmarking, has continued its unstoppable momentum this year, and will probably do so in 2007. But we also love StumbleUpon: the 4 year-old site shows us that not all successful startups were an instant hit. Even so, the enthusiasm for StumbleUpon is almost universal, and we like their new StumbleVideo service.  Your choice was Trailfire, a service that lets you create “trails” of pages and share them with others. We gave the service a cautiously positive review when it launched, and we’d still love the ability to create new trails without downloading the browser plugin.  Hot for 2007: SportsVite, Ultrafan  This category had some very strong contenders. The People’s Choice went to the high school sports site Takkle (we like it too), while we picked FanNation. As we’ve said in the past, FanNation’s interface can be a little bamboozling at first, but we think overall the site’s design and feature set is strong. We feel the same way about Takkle, which has improved dramatically with the recent addition of video. However, SportsVite and Ultrafan were also very strong, and new to us. We hope to have more coverage of all these sites in the New Year. Our testing also suggested that none of these sites has established a large user base yet – there’s still plenty of opportunity for newcomers in this market.  Hot for 2007: Zooomr, Webshots, ImageShack, Tabblo, Pickle, BubbleShare  Our choice in this category is probably fairly predictable: Flickr was one of the early innovators in the photo-sharing space, to the extent that other new photo-sharing sites began to be labeled “Flickr clones”. Perhaps one of the biggest innovators this year has been Zooomr, which has added features at a tremendous pace – they lost out narrowly in the voting to the media-sharing site Twango (we also gave that one a fairly positive review this year), but we think Zooomr might be one of the hottest players as we go into 2007. We’re also excited about BubbleShare, a startup that hasn’t gained much coverage here, but seems to have some innovative ideas. And let’s not forget about Webshots, which was massively improved by a redesign and the addition of many new features this year.  Hot for 2007: Metacafe, Motionbox, Revver, vSocial, StupidVideos, Blip.tv, iFilm, Eyespot  How could we fail to choose YouTube for this category? Almost certainly the hottest startup this year, YouTube not only outpaced the competition, but provided a genuine threat to existing media companies. Their acquisition by Google showed just how far the service had come, and the appearance of a YouTube video player on the front page of Time Magazine ended the year on a high. Your pick, meanwhile, was Gotuit, which recently took social tagging a step further with the launch of its SceneMaker tool.  But frankly, there were a lot of interesting video startups this year. We also loved Jumpcut, Grouper, Eyespot, Motionbox, Veoh, Metacafe, Revver, vSocial, vPod.tv, StupidVideos, Blip.tv and iFilm – in fact, all the nominees provide hours of entertainment (or time wasting!), and all have innovated at a fast pace. And let’s not forget about MySpace Video: it might not be a hot startup, but MySpace members seem to be making good use of the video section. In fact, MySpace Video versus YouTube will probably be the hardest fought battle in the video space next year.  Hot for 2007: YourMinis, Protopage, Webwag  There’s little doubt that Pageflakes and Netvibes are considered the top of their class. Having joined late in the game, when Netvibes was already leading the pack, we doubted that Pageflakes could make much headway – they proved us wrong, and Pageflakes is now considered to be one of the strongest contenders in this market. Netvibes also performed well in the voting, while YourMinis attracted a good amount of grassroots support – we gave them a positive review back in November. We think Webwag is also a strong contender, but once again we’re wondering whether the newcomers can make progress in this market.  Hot for 2007: MingleNow, HeyLetsGo, Planypus, ILCU (and others)  Although neither service has gained must coverage on Mashable this year, largely due to a lack of announcements, we still feel that Yelp and Upcoming.org are among the leading players in this market. Meetup is also an established community that deserves props. The People’s Choice, meanwhile, went to CollegeTonight, which successfully rallied its user base to score a high number of votes.  However, the other nominees were all strong – HeyLetsGo, Vibely, MingleNow, Planypus, ILCU, OnMyCity, Do512, eVelvetRope, Eventful, TripTie, TripAdvisor, Gusto, Travelistic and the rest. We feel, however, that this market is still getting established, and that makes it hard to tell which of the newcomers will make gains. We hope to return to these sites throughout 2007.  Hot for 2007: Pandora, YourSpins, Rapspace, ProjectOpus, iLike, Splice, MusicHawk and More  When it came to choosing our favorite musical site, it really came down to two choices: Last.fm and Pandora. The clincher: Last.fm has always been inherently social, while Pandora has only added social features very recently, and we’ve yet to see how users react to them. The People’s Choice, meanwhile, was neck and neck – when we closed the voting, the number of votes for ReverbNation and MOG was so close that we’re declaring both as the winners. We don’t strongly disagree with your choice: we gave positive reviews to both sites earlier this year. However, we’d also like to say that ProjectOpus, YourSpins, Qloud, iLike, Jamendo, Splice, Bandwagon, Finetune, MusicHawk and – quite frankly – all the suggestions we received for this category have been great. Generally speaking, musical social networks seem to be of a very high caliber. Although it launched in pre-Mashable days, we’re also big fans of PureVolume, which is considered to be the leading musical social network by many, many users.  Hot for 2007: Crowdstorm, Kaboodle, ShopWiki, StyleFeeder  Kaboodle is probably one of the first startups that come to mind when you think of social shopping, but we decided to pick a startup that we think has been a great innovator: Etsy. Etsy doesn’t compete directly with the other contenders – it’s more like eBay than a shopping directory – but we like their “shop by color” tools, their “Time Machine” and their “GeoLocator”. That said, we’re also big fans of UK startup Crowdstorm and your choice, ThisNext. StyleFeeder is new to the scene, and has a strong offering – we think it could get traction in 2007. Likewise, ShopWiki and Hawkee get credit for creating strong products this year.  Hot for 2007: Friendstribe, JuiceCaster, Zingku, Moblabber, Zemble, Veeker, Treemo  The mobile space is just getting started: in fact, we don’t think anyone will know the true winners here until mid 2007. Call us geeky, but we liked Twitter‘s lightweight mobile blogging service this year, while the People’s Vote went to Wadja, which offers mobile social networking via text message. That said, we simply don’t know how this market will shake out, and for most of these startups, it’s just too early to judge. At the start of the year, it seemed that Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google in 2005, would be a hot favorite. But the service seems to have been less buzzworthy this year, and we’re not really sure why.  Hot for 2007: SneakerPlay, MothersClick, Motortopia, Minti, ComicSpace, Curbly, MyChurch, Ziki, VeryLiberating, ITtoolbox, Fanpop, ShareYourLook, FamilyThrive, Blubrry, innerTee, Listal, ConnectingMoms, FirstGiving, RealityAllStarz, CafeMom, BeGreen, AdFemme, Dianovo, eLifeList, CampusBug, SnehaH, HumanOpinion, MerchantCircle, Barrio305, GenevaOnline, MDJunction (list too long to post images!)  We’ve said before that Dogster, the social network that lets dogs connect (or more accurately, their adoring owners), is the premier example of serving a niche. We also received lots of positive feedback on LibraryThing when we covered them in the past – maybe it’s unsurprising, then, that these two sites were almost perfectly tied when it came to the voting. So we did the fair thing and awarded both sites top ranking. Our choice, meanwhile, was Flixster – we feel that Flixster has a product that will appeal strongly to mainstream users (and if their claimed stats are true, it already is), but that it will go under the radar for the geek elite.  Admittedly, however, the niche networks category was a bit like comparing an orange to a spaceship and asking which one is better: they’re just not comparable. As a result, the “Hot for 2007″ section became much more lengthy than with the other categories. We also feel that a number of niche networks missed out on nominations (perhaps because it’s nearing the holidays), and frankly any site covered on Mashable over the past year could have been eligible.  When going through this process, we realized that we hate picking winners, since it implies that there must be losers. In reality, the web is so diverse that there can be hundreds of successful social sites, each catering to slightly different groups of people. We think the end results delivered an interesting set of startups, but we’d love to hear your feedback.  Disagree with the results? Think someone else should have won? Speak out! We’re monitoring every single blog post that links to this page. What’s more, you can make it super easy for us to find your response by tagging it with “MashableAwards”.  Time to gloat? If you were picked as any of the winners or the “Hot for 2007″ picks, feel free to grab a button, post it to your company blog and revel in self-satisfaction for a while.
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