If you’re anything like me, you’re pretty overwhelmed with what seems like an infinite amount of social networking sites. I mean wouldn’t it be much nicer to see all these “friends” rather than clicking through the profiles of all these “friends?” Well in the meantime social networking sites offer a way to stay connected with old friend while also providing opportunity for artists, activists and entrepreneurs to mingle. Social network sites allow users to promote their work, find people to work with, and create communities that share interests, goals, and ideas.

Different social networking sites are geared toward different goals, from sharing good books to sharing plans to save the world to simply just making new friends. Here are just 10 of the hundreds of social networking sites available:

1) MySpace: Probably the most popular of the networking sites, MySpace offers an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. MySpace has greatly helped promote new bands, comedians, and social issues. The site is so popular it’s even become a verb aka “hey totally MySpace me!”

2) Facebook: Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. The most unique feature of Facebook is that it enables anyone, anywhere, to build complete applications that you can choose to use. Users can define their experience on Facebook by choosing applications that are useful and relevant to their world.

3) Takepart: Our hosting site is a networking site allowing users to organize and grow with like-minded individuals, connect actions to videos, blogs and media, add your own voice and content to the community, and expand your resources with Takepart’s action dashboard.

4)Nextcat: Nextcat hopes to create the first global online networking community for all things relating to the entertainment industry. They’re 100% independent, and not beholden to any large corporation. Nextcat provides a marketplace of ideas and opportunities for both established and emerging talent, as well as a forum and meeting place for fans and enthusiasts.

5)LinkedIn: This site is focused specifically on career networking. LinkedIn allows users to find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended. It also allows users to be found for business opportunities, search for great jobs, discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals, post and distribute job listings, find high-quality passive candidates and get introduced to other professionals through the people you know.

6)Friendster: For many (myself included) this was the first networking site everyone joined. Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them. Users can connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests. Friendster prides itself in delivering a clean, user-friendly and interactive environment where users can easily connect with anyone around the world.

7)Flickr: This is a photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its organization tools that allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means. From newbie photogs to photo pros, Flickr connects people who love pics.

Massify: This site which I recently wrote about is a social network that operates around film production, matching film creatives and movie fans together in order to create new films. It also allows users to vote on which new projects should receive funding.

9) Idealist.org: Idealist is a project of Action Without Borders, and is an interactive site where people and organizations can exchange resources and ideas, locate opportunities and supporters, and take steps toward building a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives.

10) Goodreads.com: Goodreads’ mission is to improve the process of reading and learning throughout the world. Most book recommendation websites work by listing random people’s reviews. On Goodreads, when a person adds a book to the site, all their friends can see what they thought of it. It’s common sense. People are more likely to get excited about a book their friend recommends than a suggestion from a stranger.