Later this month Capzles expects to announce musicians and other brands using Capzles, and, said Anderson, "We'll be offering a widget so you can make it look like part of your Web site, embed it on your blog, Facebook, et cetera...like a YouTube video or a Flickr slideshow, but letting people pop it to fullscreen."

"We're doing great, in terms of growth," Anderson states. "We're up over 1,000 per cent from the beta." Based on key metrics about engagement --how long people are staying on the site, and how many pieces of content or pages they look at, "We rank very high versus established sites."

Another social networking company evolving its strategy is YouChoose, which started out focusing on causes and this fall plans on branching out to topics.

"On the member side, we've been doubling about every three months," said Mike Dever, YouChoose CEO. "We've got close to about half a million members across the social network groups. Some of the top brands will pay for placement on the channel, (or) for their own channel."

One example of a new social network twist is Diigo, which started as a Web annotation service, and re-launched in March as a knowledge-sharing community. Today, Diigo calls itself a "social bookmarking and annotation service, and, claims"almost a million users at present," said Diigo founder Wade Ren."We're not yet profitable, but we are generating revenues. We will becoming out with a full fee premium service soon."

Two-year-old Me.dium brings another twist to the social networking scene. Not claiming to be a social network, Me.dium recently launched Me.dium Social Search as a way of "gaining social information based on the activity of others," said David Mandell, co-founder and vice president of marketing.

"It's the first 'crowd powered search engine,' getting information based on what other people have been searching," Mandell said.

Survival comes down to generating revenue.

"Revenue continues to be a challenge," Gillin said. "The advertising model is the most popular, but not necessarily the most desirable. Ads combined with premium (or) gated members seem to be best."

PeopleJam's Edelman agrees. "I don't think you can be successful these days with less than two million unique visitors [sessions] per month," he said. "For a social media site depending on revenue from advertising, anything less won't be successful. And you don't start getting into powerful business models until you're well over five million uniques per month."

One important change, notes Gillin, is that the cost of launching a Web site and services is dramatically less than it was a few years ago."Companies don't need huge amounts of venture capital and ads to survive. Guy Kawasaki launched his Trumors Web site for $13,000, where five years ago it would have cost him about a half a million."

Will niche social network players survive?

"That's unknown," states Owyang. "If they can get a thriving community, advertisers come in and fund it. For example, 'communities around cars' have a great opportunity. We'll definitely see a shake-out."