The world of social networking has of course exploded over the past few years, and it continues to grow. There are many people diving into the world of social networking every day it seems, and new social networking sites seem to pop up every day as well.

Therefore it can be hard to sort through all of the chaos to find the truly useful social networking sites. You can use this overview to find some of the most useful web 2.0 platforms whether you are looking for personal interaction or business promotion and growth.

• Facebook: Facebook can be highly effective for reaching out to potential clients and customers with similar interests and passions. It can be a great tool for expanding your business presence and awareness. Of course, it's also the cornerstone of the personal social networking sites, and is a great place to stay updated with friends and family while meeting new people as well.
• Twitter: Twitter is great for keeping things as quick and easy as possible. It's a fun way to follow celebrities and other prominent people, and to use a variety of interesting applications. For business, it can be a way to drive traffic to your site and promote some of your products and services.
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a great way to network yourself as a professional. You will be able to find new colleagues and even potential employers, business partners or coworkers. Gain a presence in your specific field by growing your presence in this business networking site.
• Wooxie: Wooxie is a great social networking site for both microblogging and macroblogging. It combines some of the best features of Facebook and Twitter into one platform and actually allows you to post directly to both of those sites and services as well. This makes it a great all in one platform for personal usage and business promotion as well.
• MySpace: MySpace might seem old school now, but it's still very popular. Of course it's great as a personal site for connecting with friends. The businesses that can make the most of it include of course musicians, events, bars, restaurants, other happenings and things to do and so forth.
• Technorati: Technorati is the place that bloggers call home, and it can be a great promotional resource for your blog or website. Post your blog to Technorati, get involved with other blogs and bloggers in your market or niche and more. The more people follow your own blogs and sites, the more presence you gain. You can even write Technorati articles to link back to your website and gain exposure.
• Second Life: Second Life can be hard to exploit for business usage, but can e a fantastic outlet for nonprofits looking to connect to those who support their cause and mission. It's also a fun and engaging environment for personal usage, and can be used in a variety of ways for holding conferences, providing lectures and much more. It is as much of a game and addicting hobby as it is a social networking site.
• YouTube: Of course YouTube is the biggest video site on the Internet but it can also be a great place for your business to turn to help generate some buzz and some traffic while growing your presence. Create your own channel, include links back to your site and start posting some videos. Make sure you create short, engaging and unique videos and never assume that if you build it, they will come. You have to earn your viral audience.
• Flickr: Flickr is a great social networking site for anything that can be displayed with photos. This doesn't mean just art, this can be photos from a recent event or gathering, creative uses of your new product, customer contests for the best photos about your business, products and services and more.
• Friendster: Friendster is primarily for personal usages, connecting with friends and family, sharing information, photos and videos, creating personal blogs and more.
• Digg: Digg is a fantastic service for promoting individual pieces of content. If you build up a following by providing useful, unique and engaging content and by responding to others in the community you will be able to drive a substantial amount of traffic to your pages.
• Squidoo: Squidoo can be a great business tool for growing your presence and increasing the traffic and rankings to your website, blog or products. Create a "lens" to inform people about a product or service, promote an event or anything else.
• Orkut: Orkut is starting to really grow and expand, in large part because of its integration with other Google services. It is of course owned and operated by Google, and therefore you will be able to access and use a lot of the information you work with in your Gmail account, YouTube account and other Google operated services.
• Bebo: Bebo is operated by AOL and its unique approach is a focus really on the media side of things as opposed to just sharing information. This means an emphasis on photos, music and videos, creating a personal "timeline" with all of this content, sharing it with your friends and more.

Are there more social networking sites than this? Of course there are, and that's the whole point. There are hundreds upon hundreds of them out there today, but not all of them are created equally.

All of the useful free social networking sites mentioned above have specific uses, tools or platforms that will enable you to really derive some value from when used in the right way, whether you are looking for another personal connection tool, a way to grow your business or both. If you don't know where to turn, then you can use this above overview to get started finding the best social networking sites out there, the ones that are truly useful and can provide you with real benefits and advantages.