digFoot - Searching for Social Networks

Posted by Rene LeMerle in September 21st, 2007

Leveraging the social web phenomenon is “front of mind” for most modern marketers, and a new start-up called digFoot aims to help us to identify which ones to target. digFoot is a directory (not very web 2.0 sounding) of social networks on the web.

Admittedly, trying to find which social networks fit a niche, or tap into the right target market, is a challenge with traditional search engines like Google or Yahoo! Even more social orientated search services serve up a plethora of irrelevant results - so the premise of digFoot is promising.

The service is not just for marketers like me trying to wade through the quagmire of social networks… for those general netizens looking for the right online community to call home, digFoot promises an equally useful service.

The service is still in its infancy, only launched in Aug 2007, but is building up a database of useful resources. Currently there are 1338 social networks in the database (as of today), which are gathered through a combination of trawling the web and community submissions (edited of course).

What i’d love to see is the service extend beyond just being able to search for social networks. Imagine being able to search the content stored on them (for those not walled in - pay attention Facebook). When I first saw the site’s slogan ” Digital Footprint Tracker for Social Networks v1.1″ - i thought they had finally done it…but alas - not yet. Perhaps version 2 will be when they drop their trump card (hint for developers). The team describe the plans in the “about us” section:

“What I thought could be neat would be to have some kind of central place where all the social networks could be found and then use that as a starting point for branching out into other networks looking for those long lost friends and business connections.

Well, that was the initial idea that I started sketching out on my notepad and that later morphed into what you are looking at today - version 1.0 of Digfoot.com - which was launched in August 2007 and still is under hefty development so expect frequent improvements and updates.”

As with all databases, it will become more useful as the index grows (currently a few standard searches still present no result) - but worth keeping an eye on this one - it could be a real gem!