MySpace and Facebook Rivals are Growing

DAILY NEWS -- Oct 2 -- Piczo (teenage focus) is one of a raft of second-tier social-networking sites. XuQa is run by San Francisco startup iVentster, which lets users play games against their online friends and offers awards to the top scorers. Hi5 comes with a built-in music player. Last month, Piczo attracted 10.2 million uniques, compared with Facebook's 15.5 million (comScore). Instead of trying to get people to ditch their MySpace and Facebook accounts, they're persuading kids to sign up for a third or fourth social-networking site, along with the ones they already use. Funtigo shutting down in February 2004 and created a new page at funtigo.com/switch, which led to Piczo. The founder wrote back to ~100 of the teenagers who had emailed him earlier, telling them they could keep using the service if they switched to Piczo.  It was Piczo's first and only marketing push. FULL ARTICLE @ DAILY NEWS

Mark Brooks: Friendster started similarly, with a small group of avid core users. Bebo (BirthdayAlarm.com users) and MySpace (eUniverse) had more of a marketing push, and faster growth rates.