There is more every day. I found several examples bouncing around the web like popteen.com, which focuses on popular culture for teenage girls. Clearly the surge in social networking sites indicates that this is big business. While each company would like to grab their own hearty slice of the market, there appears there may be great dilution over time, creating a segmented market. MySpace and Facebook already have segregated communities along the lines of education and affluence. There are social networking sites for the business community, and others are being established as I type. I found leveragesoftware.com that provides platform tools to create your own social networking community for business or whatever you choose.

I have shared some of my own experiences with an internet start-up from the inside, referring to my company as CB Stealth. CB Stealth is CircleBuilder.com (beta version) a social networking site for people of faith who would like an alternative to the MySpace.coms and Facebook.coms of the world. I am on the advisory board and have become an angel investor. This site has an emphasis on group-to-group networking with very tight terms of service but will be self-policing in general with regards to content. We expect that the types of content tolerated on the site will be more limited by the community than on other sites.

While the faith-based community is very large, it is also a very under-served market. We are finding that some angels and VCs do not even want to discuss anything to do with faith. On the other hand, we are finding many communities that are very interested in joining, and partnering with, the company. And faith-based communities are springing up on other larger sites on their own, like Facebook. Perhaps the larger sites will become the aggregators of the smaller site. That is a real possibility.

Internet start-up companies are very different than off-line companies in the early stages. Some things are easier, some more difficult. The internet universe expands so fast that you cannot program as fast as you come up with new and better ideas. Some things on the internet are very well established and others are still primitive. In my view, the web allows for great aggregation of ideas in one place or on one site, but in many respects it is also a place that is becoming more diluted (sometimes polluted) and is evolving. It will be evolving for years, and if CircleBuilder has any success and makes a small contribution to that evolution than we have entered a new dimension. Imagine intertwining faith and evolution in one construct -- oh oh, that could be trouble.

To find more potential opportunities and verify my track record read Chasing Value or Serious Money.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He is on the advisory board of internet start-up CircleBuilder.com.