It's unquestionable that social-media sites have transformed the college experience. But what is there besides obvious players like Facebook and MySpace? A lot, actually. CNET News.com has picked 10 social-networking sites, ranging from party hubs to academic resources, that fit right into a college lifestyle--and none of these sites auto-selects "Tom" as your friend or allows you to "poke" Mark Zuckerberg.
Kicking off our list is a new-ish site, Scholar, which was created by educational software company Blackboard. (Freshmen: you'll get very familiar with Blackboard very soon.) It's a social-bookmarking site not unlike Delicious, but with an academic slant and a focus on sifting out the massive amounts of information on the Web based on quality. It's geared toward students, grad students and professors, so a fair amount of the content may be too technical for the average undergrad. Nevertheless, this site can make it much easier to find high-quality resources in a limited amount of time--you know, when you're down to the wire and start to count Wikipedia as a source. (Hint: don't do that.)
Captions by Caroline McCarthy, CNET News.com
Photo by Staff, CNET News.com
Caption by Caroline McCarthy
