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"The Social Networking Awards are sponsored by Photobucket.  If you have a social site, you can use Photobucket's JWidget tool - this is a free plugin that provides image and video hosting for your users.  Over 400 sites currently use it, including Friendster, RockYou, Slide and Piczo.\nI wanted to save this up for Monday, but we thought we'd give you some extra time over the weekend for nominations.  First up, many thanks to Photobucket for offering to sponsor the Social Networking Awards 2006, which will run from now until the end of next week.  The winners will be announced late on Thursday, December 21st (which for some of you will be Friday morning).A few notes to begin.  The Awards are not specifically for social networks launched in 2006 - there are sites  launched years ago that have made big strides this year (StumbleUpon, for instance).  Also note that networks certainly don't need to be US-based, but they should be open to registration from anywhere in the world and should have an English version available.  Obviously, the nominees don't need to have been mentioned on Mashable, since I'm sure we've missed plenty of good ones.  You can nominate your favorite sites in the following categories.  To nominate a site, put the site name and category in the comments.  Alternatively, you can write a post on your own blog and trackback or link to this post.  You can nominate one site in each of the twelve categories.  Voting will begin on Monday night and continue until Thursday night.\n1. Large Scale\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nThis is for social networks with more than 500,000 users.  That would include MySpace, Friendster, Multiply, hi5, Piczo, Tagworld, Bebo, Tagged, Orkut, Xanga, Facebook and many more.  How is a social network defined?  At the very least, these sites should have profile pages with the ability to add friends.  If you need inspiration, Wikipedia has a good list of large social networking sites.  Since there isn't a huge number of small-scale business networks (apart from Ecademy, perhaps), LinkedIn and Xing will be eligible.  Ryze would probably make the cut, too.\n2. Widgets and Add-ons\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nThis category is for companies that provide tools for blogs and social networks.  Examples include Stickam, Slide.com and MyBlogLog.  Photo hosting sites like Imageshack are not in this category.  However, avatar services like Meez are eligible.  And since we don't have a specific category for instant messaging, we'll include Plugoo, MeeboMe and other IM tools that can be embedded in web pages.\n3.  Social News and Social Bookmarking\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nThere's more to social news than Digg.  Also check out Newsvine, Reddit and Netscape.com.  As for social bookmarking, we're talking about sites like del.icio.us, BlueDot, Ma.gnolia and all those other buttons you see at the bottom of blog posts.\n4. Sports\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nThere are so many sporting social networks springing up that they deserve their own category.  These can be general sports networks, or targeted towards specific sports.  Examples include FanPage, FanNation and Tired and Tested. \n5.  Photo Sharing\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nPhoto-sharing greats like Webshots and Flickr would qualify here, as would Pickle, Zooomr and many more.  Photo hosts count, too: Imageshack, for instance.  Photobucket won't be allowed to win due to the conflict of interest, but feel free to nominate them if you think they're the best.\n6.  Video Sharing\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nEverything video-related goes here.  Metacafe, iFilm, WeWin and many, many more.  Search Mashable for \"video\" to see just how many there are.  A little startup called YouTube seems to have been making some progress this year, too.\n7. Startpages\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nI'm sure you're familiar with these - Pageflakes, Netvibes, Protopage, Webwag and the rest.  Most of these aren't social networks, but they do allow you to aggregate content from social sites like Flickr and YouTube.  \n8. Places and Events\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nWhether it's about organizing events or reviewing local clubs, bars and restaurants, it's eligible for this category.  HeyLetsGo, Vibely, MingleNow, Planypus and ILCU are just a few of the potential candidates.\n9. Music\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nSocial sites and social networks that focus on music.  Last.fm, FineTune and JamGlue, for instance.\n10. Social Shopping\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nCrowdstorm, ThisNext and StyleHive are a few examples.  Many of these are bookmarking sites as well, but they'll only be eligible for this category.\n11. Mobile\nNominations Now Closed for This Category  If it's made for your phone or mobile device, it goes here.  Friendstribe, JuiceCaster, Dodgeball and Zemble are a few that spring to mind.  Any more suggestions?\n12. Niche and Miscellaneous Networks\nNominations Now Closed for This Category\nThis is a huge category, but includes sites that have carved out interesting niches.  Dogster, for instance, or Sneakerplay's social network for sneaker fans.  Parenting, too: Minti, Maya's Mom and MothersClick are just a few of the newer ones.  Curbly built a social site for DIY, while NextCat built one for entertainment industry.  If you want to remind yourself of the niche networks covered on Mashable, search this site for \"niche\" via Google.\nSince it's a Saturday, I'll post reminders on Sunday and Monday to get your nominations in.  Remember: you need to post the site name and category in the comments to make a nomination.  Voting will begin on Tuesday.  If you want to rally the troops on your company blog, here are some badges to use.  Just copy and paste the following code.  \nNote: You need to copy the code direct from Mashable - some feedreaders will insert extra code that will prevent it from working.\n\n\n\nNow get nominating!\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/12/15/social-networking-awards-nominations-open-early/>