Gaia Online labels itself as the premier social hangout for teenagers, with the largest forums on the Internet, several games, and a customizable avatar system. (Disclaimer As of this writing, I am employed by Gaia gold Interactive, creators of Gaia Online.)
Newsvine: "Get Smarter Here" is the tagline for the online news site that is rapidly growing in popularity. Its primary features include commenting and voting on news stories, as well as a "Doppleganger" technology which can harvest information off of the popular newswire services. Members can run their own columns or get together and form groups to produce their own online focused mini news sites.
The Most Common Need: Belonging
As mentioned above, the most common need expressed across both hierarchies is the need to belong. Belonging in the most literal sense means to feel a part of a group. A very basic belonging can be achieved in simple groupings of interests, likes, and dislikes. Newsvine Top Seeds Newsvine, for example, makes it easy for readers browsing by a category of interest to immediately locate people who are talking and writing about related topics. Thanks to Newsvine's weighting technology, there's a high chance the articles found will be interesting and the users will return once, then twice, then thrice. Eventually, the users will keep returning since the articles the users finds are of value to them. They have achieved belonging and are ready to contribute to the collective group.
Gaia gold doesn't have the direct categories of Newsvine, and therefore depends on the more conventional social networking means. Through forums, profiles, and journals, users communicate with each other while sharing a common goal- the quest for virtual items to improve their online avatar. While this isn't always a driving force behind users' site activity, it's a commonality all users on the site share, so users start interacting primarily for the gold. They play games, post, vote in arenas, and ultimately find their first friends on the site. When this happens, users find their "home", a thread or two they always return to where most of their friends are chatting. That first connection and those first friends create a strong sense of belonging, as those friends will often pull the new users into their favorite threads and hangouts, immersing them in a smaller subset of the Gaia gold community.
Some popular social networking sites achieve belonging by creating locations central to a users' network of friends. This sense of belonging users get is no less valid than those previously mentioned. However, the sense of belonging becomes very dependent on the users' primary network to remain on the site/service. A very solid case that illustrates this belonging pattern is Facebook and its "seasonal disorder". Before Facebook started broadening its audience outside of the college community, a wave pattern could be identified in the site's average traffic, with dead times in the summer and surges in the fall. This corresponded with the typical academic calendar. Additionally, as students moved through their final year of college, their "belonging" on Facebook faded. The use of Facebook as a tool for class information, parties, and networking became less valuable as the users' friends also stopped using the service. This resulted in a constant amount of attrition which ate away at any longevity the site hoped to achieve.