WHAT YOU'LL FIND: A great way to get connected to peers, friends and friends of friends. You'll love logging in, watching your network grow, searching and browsing other members that are connected to you. Free to join, contact others, but you have to be invited first by another member.

WHAT WE FOUND: Consumating is a free social network whose central theme is interactivity with other members. It’s quick and easy to join with just one page registration to make you a member, but choose carefully your user name, your witty one-liner, and descriptive tags (one or two word searchable descriptions of yourself), and you’re in. After you login as a member complete as much as you can of the next steps since as a new member you’ll be announced to the Consumating community and you want your profile to look great when you start. Looking great, being funny and active in the community is what makes this service so much fun. Quizzes, questions of the week and lot’s of variety in the contests will keep you returning over and over. We really like the standard layout of the profile/blog pages, you won’t get lost looking for the info you want when you visit a member’s page and the thumbs up / thumbs down feature to rate other members is used to mark member’s popularity and ranking within the site which is great to meet people that have high popularity. Consumating is a fun, active and participation oriented service that you’ll come back to over and over to update your own blog, play the games and meet and rank other members and create your “peeps” network. Also available are Consumeetings (meetings), both online and offline, that can be arranged by the members to meet each other by group interest and location.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Service created mainly for singles but also allows people that are ‘taken’ to join. Free to join and use all features. Add your Consumating profile and blog easily to any other blog you have. Consumating offers both online and offline connections as set up by members.

WHAT WE FOUND: Friendster is currently in beta mode, which means it’s free to join and make contact with others that are members. This is a connecting community based on friendships and friends of friends. When you join you are creating, or joining, a network that only works as hard and as good as you do, since any and all contacts you can make have to be in your Friendster ring of interpersonal friendships. Think of the ‘degrees of separation’ game that allows you to be a friend of a friend of anyone in the world. At Friendster, if they are a member, you can meet them too! To make this service work for you, you will invite others to join or have been invited yourself. Your membership consists of a gallery that has the information of members in your network, a message center to check incoming emails and save replies to messages, an events calendar that your network of friends puts together and an online store of recommended merchants. You can have up to 5 pictures available in your profile. The profile questions are quite basic, but allow you to describe yourself well, leading to introducing yourself to others. 3 types of searches will help you create or join your network of friends, search by email address, name and by interests but remember, they have to be in your network of friends before you can find and contact them.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Friendster if currently free (while in beta mode), has the basic features of an online service that allows you to create a network of friendships to meet people. If your nervous about joining and don’t want to have to email a lot of your friends before you can see what it’s all about, follow this link and you’ll be invited into the aLoveLinksPlus.com network of friends. Straight and same sex contacts available, depending on your network of friends.

WHAT WE FOUND: MingleNow is your online starting point to meet with other members at your real world hangouts. The registration page is quickly completed just be sure you have a picture ready to upload as you join, you’ll look lame using one of the stock photos in your profile. The goal of MingleNow is to create a community of people that are in the same area of America, who go to the same places to hang out, eat dinner, have a few drinks, dance, whatever. An introduction service of sorts. The profile space provided is somewhat limited but allows you to post as much information about yourself as you like. As well, to make MingleNow work as intended, you need to add one or more places that you hang out and connecting begins there. Post where you go and what time and other members can join you there. Adding your hangout is easy and through crosslinking you’ll see who else has added the same place to there list of places , visit there profile, and arrange to hangout together. A great idea! You can easily add your MingleNow profile and places to your MySpace and Friendster blogs to create an ever widening group of people to meet and hang out.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Free to join, create profile and add places you hang out. Browse through people, places, events and groups to find other members that are in your area, ready to meet you in the real world. Contact through private messaging on a member’s profile page or through the forum.

WHAT WE FOUND: FriendCircles.com offers all the features you’d expect in a first-rate networking website. You create your account and unique home page for free. Invite friends, relatives to join your inner circle. As they join and add friends your outer circle (the network) grows. The profile information you provide allows others to learn about you and you always have control over who can read your profile, your journals and blogs. Separating profiles into the type of member you are (looking for social friends, business, dating, etc) makes the service more reliable and better prepared about the other members you’ll meet. Features include online photo albums, Instant Messenging and email, file sharing and a calendar. We found Friend Circles easy to use, and the features a lot of fun. Joining groups that were of topics we are interested in and creating our own group, is a magnet that will keep us logging in again and again. We really like the easy to remember home page ‘username.friendcircles.com’ that isn’t common with most social network services.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Free to join and grow your network. Features include instant messenging, email service, groups, calendar and online photo album.

WHAT WE FOUND: Webdate and Webdatemobile offer a free trial that allows you to add your profile and picture to their services and send messages and replies to other members. Once you’ve started the join process you’ll have to monitor your email inbox for your password that will allow you to begin the process of completing your profile. The first part is a combination of outward appearance selections and two essay-type questions that allow you to introduce yourself and your ideal date. Beware of accidentally selecting multiple choices in the “What is your ethnicity” question. We were able to select all ethnicity options without getting an error. Once you have completed the four steps of joining you can complete other areas of your profile, begin searching for other members, join in on the video chats (provided you have a webcam) and even begin your Webdatemobile free trial. Approval of our review profile was very fast, approval allows you to be available for other members to find you. You can also hide your profile if you want. The Webdate main section includes a “New Faces” area for new members that have uploaded a photo of themselves, so be sure to have a photo ready. Try to keep the photo of good quality and a “head shot” only. Many people use poor shots and this certainly costs them in lower interest from other members. It’s easy to send someone a message but keep in mind that any replies will be routed to your email address that you signed up with and any replies you send will also be routed through the Webdate service and forward to the member’s email address, so you both are anonymous until you choose to reveal that information. A very good security feature. There is also a “Network” feature that allows you to add members you like to your profile area to keep track of them and grow your network by meeting friends of these friends. However, when trying to access this area we received a “search error” that was very general in nature and not helpful. We did not try the Webdatemobile service, although it’s easy to check if your phone model and service provider support the Webdatemobile service. Webdatemobile allows you to access the service through your phone, so you can view member profiles and send text messages to other members. Webdate.com does have a couple of errors that need to be corrected at the time of this review. If you’re in Canada, or looking to meet someone in Canada, you cannot search for them via postal code or country as the Canadian postal code lookup does not work and in the international search Canada is missing. Once you are a member this is not an issue, but it shows poorly for Webdate as a professionally designed service. Our email message to their general support address notifying them of this omission was not replied to within 24 hours, which also bodes poorly. It’s also odd that they have grouped Canada into the “United States City Search feature”. The help section is very light on information which may force you to wait more than a day or two for replies to any problems you have. This should be improved. If any fees are involved in using this service it is not made apparent upon joining or available anywhere on the site. Nor is the “free” explained as to what, when and how.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Free to join, add your profile, send and reply to messages. A very well used video chat area with over 1000 members using dozens of rooms. Straight and same sex personals available.

WHAT WE FOUND: Twitter is your free mini blog to shout to friends and the world. Free to join, once you’ve signed up your miniblog/comment post account your Twitter is ready for your wortds. You’ll have only up to 140 characters to say what you’re doing, what’s on your mind, whatever. Twitter is free. Twitter can be fun. I’m trying to figure it out as you can see on this page: http://twitter.com/alovelinksplus I do appreciate the use of Twitter in that it’s not two-way conversationally based, you have something to say, say it. Keep what you say to yourself and the friends you allow to see or open your comments up to the public timeline area of Twitter for all to see. You’ll want to look for friends to share Twitter with to make this service usable. Visit the home page to see what others are saying, doing, posting. Twitter reminds me of the search engine Alta Vista (I think, maybe it was AskJeeves) back years ago when they had a live search feed where you could see what others were actually searching for, real time. You can click on someone’s Twitter nickname and visit their own home page, miniblog and catch up on everything they’ve said (when it’s public), add them as a friend, and most fun of all, see their Twitter group and visit them too. I don’t use the IM’s that Twitter will work on yet so I have to visit my Twitter home page to post my comments. Not a hardship but if Twitter was in a stand-alone form it would be better. Have some fun give this miniblog service a try. At least visit me and see if I’m still updating regularly.

WHAT YOU'LL FIND: Twitter is a free miniblog service, capable of being added to your SMS phone service (in some areas) as well as added to your Instant Messenger (not all IM’s supported yet). Use Twitter as a way to post what you are doing, how you are feeling, anything really, to your group of Twitter and IM friends and the world. Features and improvements are expected to change Twitter for the better soon. Visit the Twitter help and FAQ pages for current details.

WHAT WE FOUND: Simple to join and free to use, Zazzoo is going to give you some creative things to do online with your webcam and introduce you to a fun community of people that like to chat, create and share videos and become online pals. Not everyone is “Looking for fun and flirt” (you’ll need to edit your profile to select “Fun / Flirt” or both) but you do have one text area to talk about yourself, the people you’d like to meet and anything else that comes to mind. We do like the categories and options for creating “Fun” videos and “Flirt” videos, click the ‘record’ button to get started and follow the directions.