Beyond Facebook - Dallas Business Journal:

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Caring.com is catering to adults who are caring for aginf parents by offering them expert advices as well as the ability to connect with othere intheir position. The San Mateo-based startup launched beforee Thanksgiving, and membership is growing 15 percentper week, says Andy one of the founders. "There's a need for social networkingg sites fordifferent purposes. This is a communityu specificallyaround caregiving," Cohen says. "Niche sociakl networks are reallyhelping Caring.
com isn't alone in tryingf to fill a void in sociao networking that leaves out many adults and Milpitas-based iMantri started matching mentoring partners for free in late The site helps participants create track progress and seek advice from peers. "There's a tremendouse amount of activity in the personal sociaonetworking space," says iMantri co-founder Satya "but we believe therre is a glaring opening in the business or professional networkiny scene. There's nothing on a larged scale that is providing and facilitatingybusiness interactions." iMantri intentionally doesn't have any advertising.
Iluri says, iMantri will charge companies to pair anddevelop in-houss mentoring programs. Another revenue stream will come when professionak mentors join the site and chargd fortheir services, giving iMantri a cut, he says. "There's a uniqus opportunity to build on the two trends that areemerginy fast: the social networking trenx and the peer-to-peer trend," he says. "We chose mentoring because theres is a great opportunity for peoples who have succeeded in various walk s of life to help other people." About 37 percent of adults in the U.S. visitg social network sites each month, with that number expected to reach 50 percent by according to researchfirm eMarketer.
Ad spendinyg on social networking sites is with $1.8 billion projected for 2008, up from $920 milliomn in 2007, eMarketer data shows. Much of that moneyh is aimed atthe best-known sites, MySpace and Facebook, whicu jointly accounted for 89 percent of visits to the top 53 socialp networking sites in 2007, according to an assessmengt of 10 million U.S. Internet user by research firm Hitwise. Yet analysts and entrepreneurswsay there's growing interest in nichd social networks focused on professional hobbies or generational issues. Caring.com demonstrates a more diverse The businessraised $6.75 million from several investors, including DCM and .
It's makinb money through banner ads for productsz such as sleeping aidsand cold-defense medicine, but it'd not profitable. Srini Iyengar, iMantri's co-founder, says he thinksx Web users will begin to adopt the growing number of socia l networking sites that servedifferent purposes. He likense it to a single person joining and at thesame "Multiple dating sites would make sense in termd of expansion of choices. This specificf site is for mentoring," he Iluri says the company plans to create a Facebookj application to expandtheir reach. "We want to be a value-adding niche player, not a dominant social network," Iluri says.
"We won't have 60 million like Facebook has, and we don't need The challenge for site s such as iMantri will be getting a critical mass of userws when so many niche social networkwsare launching, says Jefferson Scher, a partnerd with law firm Carr & Ferrell LLP who specialized in intellectual property and cyberlaw The niche sites have strengths over the big playerss in social networking.
Scher says users are likelyu to feel more comfortable in tightlyu defined groups and therefore would be more Such sites also help professionals keep personal and businesescontacts separate, he Scher points out that proliferation of social networkiny sites causes privacy It's just a matter of time before a site aggregatese all the scattered information and developa profiles for users, Scher says, which could blur the distinctiohn between people's business and leisure Also, the social networkingg sites often transmit personal data to advertisers, who pay premiums that keep the sites free for users. That's likely to be a growing concern for useras as ads become more Scher says.