Talk about an explosion, it seems that Social Media Networking is still very much alive and hyped to the roof (the growth rate was estimated at +400% for 2007). But now, the first real battle has to be won. With growing criticism the last few couple of months towards how Social Media affects a brand – it will be interesting to see if some of the giants are forced out of the market because companies will start to re-evaluate their participation in Social Media Marketing, or if simply a lot of the Social Media sites (as in Social Web Applications) will start to focus more on what consumers write instead of businesses or newspapers. Of course, most of them are generated by user content, but a lot of the primary sources, such as a newspaper/magazine post is more often from a more trustworthy source than from someone like me – a wannabe blog journalist.

Of course, there are already a few sites that focus more on the U2U or C2C kind of aspect rather than the B2C side of things. But there still seem to be an overwhelming amount of Social Web Applications out there that doesn’t really provide a service which is needed. But again, who would have thought Facebook was “needed”?

I’ve recently tried out Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter and I’d have to say that StumbleUpon and Twitter are the only sites that I found somewhat cool and useful. It’s a great way to find new sites and resources that might be of interest to you, as well as get real-time news and updates of course (Twitter). Digg might be half useful, but if you already use an RSS-reader it’s utterly overflow I suppose.

Who’s here to stay and who will have to go?