Ten Social Web Community Sites You Might Not Know About

Wesabe is a financial community Web site; the premise is that you share your financial struggles and successes with others and learn from each other’s mistakes and triumphs. There’s loads of great user tips (you can also submit your own best financial suggestions), plus, Wesabe is a fantastic Web-based money manager – you can actually use it for financial planning and personal finance management. Wesabe takes your financial info and compares it others (completely anonymously), and shows you where you could trim the fat or stand to spend a little bit more, it’s like a free, personalized budgetary consultation.

Basically, Stylehive this is where all those really cool style setters and trend mavens hang out and share their shopping wisdom with you. Stylehive is built on the concept of discovering and sharing the hippest stuff out there, from jewelry to apparel to shoes. Once you join the Stylehive community, you can build your own personalized hive that reflects your own personal style, chat with other Stylehive members, subscribe to other Stylehive-ers specific picks, and more. I always find something beautiful here.

Plazes adds a unique physical dimension to the Web – you download the free Plazes software and then the service is able to automatically detect you and tell the world where you might be at any given time. You can use Plazes to connect with other people in your area more easily, follow where your fellow Plazers are, or make new friends all over the world. One of my favorite Plazes features is just people-watching: I love to see what people are up to all over the world.

Make personal goals and find others to work toward these goals with you at Life Tango, a collaborative goal-setting community. Want to lose some weight? How about travel to Europe, learn Spanish, or spend more time with your family? Once you write down your goals at Life Tango, you can explore the community to find other folks who share the same interests, and then invite these people to help you along your journey. I really like this concept: it's a positive way to accomplish your sucess in tandem with other people.

Studies have shown that if you want to lose weight and get fit, you’ll do better with a buddy. Traineo is a community built on that concept. You get motivation and support from others who share your same fitness and/or weight loss goals, as well as accountability (you choose four people that will help keep you on track). You can also use Traineo to count calories, track your workouts, and visualize your fitness progress, as well as swap tips that have worked for you or share your struggles with the greater Traineo community.

BlueDot is a social bookmarking community much like del.icio.us or Netscape, but with a few twists. You can share anything with friends and the greater Web community simply and easily by “dotting” what you find, create a holiday wishlist (handy for sending to people who don’t know what to get you!), and you can even add a BlueDot widget to your blog or Web site, making it easy for your visitors to get to know you and take part in what kind of content you’ve already discovered.

Frappr maps are a super fun way for people to communicate and collaborate via an interactive map that displays your whereabouts (similar to already mentioned Plazes). Frappr is specifically aimed at anyone who has a Web site, blog, or even MySpace: you can add a Frappr map to your spot on the Web and you’ll see real-time stats on who is visiting from where in the world. Frappr also is a great way for groups that might be far flung to come together.

Parents need other parents, right? Well, Minti aims to serve this demographic with our very own social community. You can use Minti to get advice from other parents, get your very own family page (upload your own pics!), and make friends with other Minti community members. The best thing about Minti is that the advice comes from other parents that are “in the trenches”, so to speak, instead of glossily produced parenting magazines that make you feel somewhat inadequate for wanting to duct tape your toddler’s feet to the floor…not that I’ve ever wanted to do that, of course.

Gimme20 is another fitness-based community site similar to Traineo that connects fitness-oriented folks all over the Web. However, Gimme20 is a bit more workout focused. You can use Gimme20 to build your own personalized workout based on what you want to do (build muscle, lose weight, tone your legs, etc.) and share workout tips with other Gimme20 community members. It’s a good way to get inspired and encouraged.

Wists provides a way to find interesting stuff on the Web and visually bookmark it. You can also browse within the Wists community and bookmark other peoples' finds, if you want. Wists couldn't be simpler. You sign up (free), and you can choose between searching through the Wists community for good bookmarks (and believe me, there's some really awesome stuff here), or, you can quickly drag and drop the Wists Toolbar in order to bookmark items on the Web to your collection.