The world is full of other faces, spaces

MySpace.Com and Facebook

.com are known as the dominant social-networking Web sites. But so far, they haven’t won over Brenda Nowlan.

Nowlan, a 14-year-old in Souris, Prince Edward Island, Canada, occasionally uses MySpace. But she spends two or three hours a day on Piczo.com. She uses Piczo to keep track of her close friends and post personal photos. “Facebook?” says Nowlan. “I’ve never heard of it.” And she’s not joking.

Piczo Inc., based in San Francisco, is one of a raft of second-tier social-networking sites that have cropped up in recent years. Social-networking sites are the Web hangouts where users, typically young people, create Web pages with their own profiles, send notes to friends and post their musings. Though none have so far seen the success of News Corp.’s MySpace, which attracted 79.6 million unique visitors in August, some of the sites have drawn millions of users.

Among the new social-networking sites is one called XuQa.com, run by San Francisco startup iVentster Inc., which lets users play games against their online friends and offers awards to the top scorers. Hi5.com, operated by San Francisco company Hi5 Networks Inc., comes with a built-in music player. Piczo, meanwhile, is similar to MySpace and Facebook Inc. in that it lets its mostly teenage users create personal Web pages filled with photos, video and lists of their online friends.

In August, Piczo attracted 10.2 million unique visitors, compared with Facebook’s 15.5 million visitors, according to comScore World Metrix, a Web-tracking division of comScore Networks Inc. Piczo is also the No. 1 social-networking site in Canada, according to Chief Executive Jeremy Verba. The site’s success has puzzled even its own founder, former software developer Jim Conning. “I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to start a Web site for teenage girls,’ ” the 40-year-old says.

The rise of these social-networking sites is another sign of the shifting tastes on the Internet, as niche audiences flock to new alternatives to MySpace and Facebook. That potentially spells trouble for those two incumbents.

For now, however, the new sites are taking a modest approach to attracting visitors. 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.