I’ll start off by saying I love POIFriend! 

I was contacted by POIfriend.com and I was rather intrigued. As you might suspect POIfriend.com (pronounced like boyfriend) is all about points of interests. Essentially, it is a social network that allows users to create and share their own POIs within their group of friends or with the entire community. With POIfriend, you can create your own POIs, download them to your GPS unit, iPhone or Blackberry, and share them with others site users and even with friends who aren’t members. Best of all, it’s free.

“The advantage POIfriend has is that you are in the driver’s seat — quite literally,” says Bill McLean, co-founder, POIfriend Inc. “We often don’t realize the sentimental value associated with the places important to us. Places are just places until they take on more of a personal, helpful, or intriguing aspect for us, so we’ve created an online community to share just that.”

“POIfriend.com is an essential tool for everyday life. It offers accessibility and sharing of your favorite shops, sporting events, restaurants, gas stations, bank machines — whatever it is that keeps your world ticking,” adds McLean.”

Since POIfriend.com is constantly updated by you, the user, the information is always current and fresh. Uploading your own POIs means that there’s no limit to the groups that you can create or the friends that you can involve. POIfriend allows you to share and grow your world, on the go, all the time. However, as exciting as this is, I feel there may be some inaccurate data. Either way, it is a great service and it is absolutely free. Here are a few more features:

– A one-stop shop for a broad-range of POI destinations
– Avoiding the hassles of store-locator navigation
– 100% FREE
– Connect with everyone you know and those you don’t
– User-friendly compatibility (works with most portable GPS-enabled
devices)
– No GPS required
– Stripping away the techno-babble from GPS and POI data
– No bio necessary – just an email will get you started
– Users have full control over the places they wish to share
– Compelling connection between businesses and your community

So what are you waiting for? Go sign up today!

As with just about any type of social site, there are tons of gaming communities in existence. So what makes weplaythis any different from the rest? Well, according to the weplaythis team, “gaming sites are dark, geeky, and cramped with porn, popups and poker ads. We just don’t like that.” So they just don’t have it. Unlike the forum-based gaming communities that probably come to mind for most people, weplaythis this avoids the dark color scheme, typical ads, and forum-based approach, presenting itself as a truly friendly social network for gamers.

The primary feature of weplaythis is the Game Shelf, where users store a virtual collection of their game library. Each user is able to fill up their shelf with all the games they’ve played, define whether they loved it or hated it, and give them a rating of one to five stars. You can also mark which games you are currently playing. Publicly, users can display their six favorites or six least favorites, 3 of each, six recent additions, or six random games on their shelf. The over 37000 games are searchable by platform, keyword, or title, and everything from arcade games to PS3 titles are in the database, which the team constantly checks against the MobyGames database in order to keep it as up to date as possible.
Another feature that I really like is the Playground, where users can upload photos of where they do their gaming and tag the image with sticky notes to point out their favorite details. It’s a great way to get an inside look on not only where and how the people you meet game, but also on how they live. The rest of the weplaythis features are fairly standard of most social networks—friends, groups, and your own personal blog. weplaythis allows you to invite or search for friends and, of course, encourages making new friends through the site. In your profile you can define and group your interests, so when joining interest-specific groups you can find people who love Second Life, Nintendo Wii, or whatever else just as much as you do. Your blog is perfect for leaving your own game reviews, keeping track of progress, and ranting about anything game-related in general. You can grab widgets to place on your own personal site or blog, allowing you to take your weplaythis space with you and weplaythis always greets you with the latest that’s been going on with you, your friends, and the site’s progress when you log in.

In addition to what they’ve already got developed and available to beta testers, weplaythis is still working on a PC/Mac compatible application that showcases what you’re currently playing and shows what others are playing. weplaythis also encourages people to share their own creations via blog or group while they work on getting the object and theme contribution features working. If your work is good enough weplaythis will feature it on the front page. Other areas to explore that are still under development include the section for games and eighty-two platforms. weplaythis is currently in private beta, but you can request an invite here or learn more about it here.

With the sad demise of Jonkenpon and 8apps along with it, some people—myself included—may be looking for a new collaborative social network. While there are still plenty out there to choose from—such as 37signal’s BaseCamp–those looking to jump in on one that has yet to become full of members just looking to get in on the next new web app may want to consider giving YouFig a go.

YouFig describes itself as Demo Collaboration Community, aiming to connect those with common interests. Pretty simple, right? That’s the point. YouFig achieves its goal in the simplest way possible: by helping people find others to discuss their interests with and to provide them with a Workspace in which to do it. YouFig has twenty-four categories and multiple sub-categories in each, for a grand total of more than 200 individual interests. Each member is allowed up to ten tags and ten categories to define their interests and specialties. YouFig will look for Workspaces that might interest you and allow you to search for Workspaces and people by category or, of course, start a new Workspace and invite new collaborators to YouFig. You can also add collaborators to your network and keep tabs on what they’re up to. By being active in the community, which includes starting, joining, voting, or collaborating on a workspace, inviting others to join, and referring collaborators, members can earn points which can be exchanged for prizes later on.

Naturally, Workspaces are a vital part of YouFig. They are where people connect, discuss, and share information on their common interest. Being in private beta, the demo version of YouFig doesn’t actually have many collaborators to contribute, making the community seem somewhat weak at times. However, YouFig was created to provide a collaborative application to organizations that need one, such as schools, corporations, and research groups. Customized communities can be ordered for free.

So what do I think of YouFig? Well it doesn’t impress me. It hasn’t drawn me into a rich community of people who share any of my obscure interests. Then again, neither have any other collaborative networks or social networks in general. Then again, when you consider the fact that there are only about 500 members taking part in the private beta demo and that several of them are inactive, you can only expect so much. I think YouFig has great potential, but it requires either a large userbase or use by a private organization to really live up to it. Then again, YouFig was not really meant to be like the larger social networks. In fact, it boasts the fact that there is “no social network required.”

If you would like to learn more, you can read Mashable’s review or visit the YouFig website. Keep in mind that this web app is still in private beta, so you’ll have to request an invite to join! Or, if you’re part of an organization that is looking for a collaborative application, go here to place an order for free.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P2XBL7hTsQ[/youtube]

If you’re anything like me, the holidays have probably managed to throw you way off schedule but, hopefully, not completely out of the loop. I’ve sung my praises for Bubbletop and Spokeo, both of which I rely on to keep up with the latest online happenings, and both of which have encouraged me to continue giving the several multi-featured, web-based RSS readers out there a chance. Streamy is the latest one I’ve come across.

Despite being clean, simply designed, and definitely functional, Streamy does not appeal to me. But the things I dislike about it are the same things that the right person would probably love. Streamy is community based; members are greeted with the most popular stories of the day rather than their own home stream and are provided with a list of sites to subscribe to, in order of popularity. Users can add their own sources, but it only seems to work with Firefox. If I’m entrusting all my subscriptions to a site I expect full functionality on any major browser.

Streamy is not just a plain old RSS reader and claims not to be trying to “kill Digg,” but it’s goal–”to bring you personally relevant news in an engaging, collaborative environment”–is pretty darn similar. I’ve seen it described as “Digg for friends” and “Google Reader for friends, ” and it’s meant to aggregate relevant content and do away with the boring RSS reader. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I would stick with Digg if that’s what I was looking for. Maybe I’m just self-centered, but I don’t want to directly deal with other people while using something that functions as my friend and feed tracker, so obviously Streamy is not my first choice simply due to it’s multitude of functions.

Since it is so community-based, however, Streamy is a great tool for those still trying to boost interest in their own blog, especially while the user base is growing and, therefore, more likely to be exposed. It’s also likely to appeal to those who are trying to build up a list of subscriptions or find new content. Despite not being one that I’ll use regularly, Streamy is definitely a great service and tool. It’s still in private beta, but you can learn more about it at www.streamy.com.

Claiming to be the largest online people search with more than 200 million people profiles from across the Web, including social networks and other online communities, I thought I would test out their claim. Needless to say, they scored high on the test.

Like I sometimes do on Google, I started simple, and I searched my name. The page was instantly filled with pictures of myself, and other various web pages, blogs, and social networks I have been in or wrote for. I searched my boss, I searched my friends, and I searched my neighbors. Trying to see whom it would not find…It found everyone. You would be thunderstruck at the people you will find. Those that I thought had nothing to do with the internet were on there.

Wink.com searches the public profiles on MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Live Spaces, and other sources. They are adding more and more networks all the time and are developing new technology to find even more people in a variety of cool ways. Wink People Search lets you find people by name, location, school, work, and interest anywhere on the web.

If you ask me, I find it kind of creepy. Of course I realized, being an active internet user, I will have things littered all over the internet about me, but it just makes me feel strange to think that companies out there specialize in bringing people altogether in services like this one, and PeopleFinder, and the others that are out there. I digress.

If you want, you can ask to be found:

“You can also use Wink to enable you to be found on the Wink search engine and other traditional search engines. By creating a profile on Wink, you can manage your web presence. Wink allows you to claim and add various places where you are online, and provides you an interface to manage all of them in one place. This gives you the power to determine what people know about you and where you are on the web.”

So there you have it folks – Wink.com, the largest online people search that is improving constantly. I must say, it has taken a bit of time out of my day doing all the searches. Not only is it fun searching for people you know, but it is helpful and free.