Xuqa is a sort of social experiment game idea thing. Looks weirdly interesting. TechCrunch reports they have stopped accepting venture capital since they have turned a profit, these days an elusive and hard thing to do, especially for web 2.0 start-ups. Currently the game played on the site is Poker, though there are plans to introduce other games as well. Players play against others and prizes are awarded to the top players. The other "game" is a virtual "hot-or-not" catwalk where people can judge each others hot pics to see who is the best looking based on social votes. Heck, CollegeClub and tons of other sites have been doing these hot-or-not things for ages as an added thing, so why Xuqa made money on it, and the others didn't I don't know, but it is impressive. Honestly I had never heard of the site before this, but it may have has some potential if it's making money already.

Reading a lot of articles about social networking, one gets the impression that the consensus is that MySpace is peaking. MySpace will ever die, I think, but whether it will be the destination it is now in five years seems doubtful. Right now no other site holds a candle to its critical mass, but that doesn't mean everyone else is resting on their laurels. Blogger Fred Stutzman has written an interesting article called Social Networking: Five Sites You Need to Know, in which he examines five of the most promising, but low-profile, contenders for MySpace's throne. On his list are Cyworld, with 90% penetration among South Korean youth, Bebo, which has 20 million registered users and is especially popular in the U.K., Hi5 with 40 million users and a strong presence in India, Faceparty, a long-established U.K. brand with 6 million users and an interesting monetization scheme, and XuQa, a service with just 1 million users aimed at the college set, which Stutzman describes as "purposefully racy, full of game-like features-an anti-Facebook." He concludes with some sound observations about social networking trends. If you're interested in social networking but as sick of MySpace as I am, it's worth a read.