I stumbled across this while doing some different research and wanted to share it because it looked useful. I’m talking about Social, at http://www.social.com. It’s a directory of social networks.

I’m not clear on when this site started or when it was last updated, because the front page blog was last updated in 2008. I do know however that the site has over 500 listings of social networks in over 100 categories. Browsing through the listings is either alphabetically or by the aforementioned categories.

Categories are all over the place and include aggregation, regional, industry specific, etc. My favorite was “Specific Interest” — there were lots of interesting categories (and a few sub-categories) here. Each resource listing includes a direct link to the site, a logo, and a brief description usually pulled from the site itself.

Some of the sites listed here are not what I would consider full social networks in a Facebook or MySpace sense; instead they’re gathering places or tools that focus on a particular communication aspect or type of multimedia. While I found these listings useful I found them even better as a jumping off point for another place, Google Sets.

Say I’m looking for cat social networks. I’ll go to Social.com and get a small list: Catster and MyCatSpace. Then I’ll take those two listings over to Google Sets, at http://labs.google.com/sets. Google Sets allows you to specify a couple of different things and get lists of additional similar things. In this case using Google Sets in conjunction with Social’s listings brought me a whole list of additional cat communities, like Stuff on My Cat, Cats in Sinks, Crazy Cat Ladies, Kitten War, and so on. You could take whatever of those listings that you found useful, add them to your Google Sets query, and generate your own very targeted cat community list.

Social.com has a lot on its own and goes great with Google Sets. Worth a look.