Tagged.com is a social networking site is very similar to MySpace, but the site is supposed to be more kid-friendly since profiles for anyone under 16 are blocked by users over the age of 18.

Tagged.com was started by founders Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith – both are currently on leave from doctoral programs at Stanford to work on Tagged.com.  Reid Hoffman (founder and CEO of LinkedIN) is currently serving on their board of directors.

Tagged.com encourages advertising and brand integration through contests and sweepstakes, quizzes and surveys, homepage takeovers, and sponsored profiles.  They currently have tons of popular brands advertising with them; including: AOL, Disney, Fox Mobile, Island Def Jam, MTV Networks, Sony Pictures, Sprite, Verizon Wireless, etc.

Unfortunately, the sign up process on Tagged.com is littered with sign-up pages for various advertisers.  Each of these pages seem like part of the registration process to become a member, but they are actually ways for advertisers to gather information about users. Here’s a typical way advertisers get access to your information:

Notice the headline: Continue to Create Your Account By Completing the Survey Below.  This is very misleading because it makes the user think that it is required to become a member.

And the buttons to avoid submitting the information and moving on is almost deceptive because the bigger button seems to suggest “Go to next page” but if you click it you’ll automatically submit all your info: address, phone number, etc to the advertiser on the page.  The small “Pass” button must be selected to avoid giving any information to advertisers.

The global navigation offers members the following areas:

Fun Stuff is an area to play arcade games, puzzles, word games, and multiplayer games.  The chat area is also pretty self-explanatory – just a bunch of chat rooms for people to talk with other members.

Changing the profile layout is very simple within Tagged – by simply dragging and dropping various widgets around into different columns.

Similar to other social networks, it’s very easy to add widgets to your profile page.  Widgets featured include: streaming videos from YouTube, a photo slide show, a music juke box, voice mail, etc.

Demographics
Tagged.com is ranked as the 9th most popular social networking site by Hitwise (February 2008). In their published statistics, they claim to have 30 million registered members and 10 million unique visitors every month – with approximately 12 billion page views a year.   They currently have about 3 million unique visitors from the United States every month.

Their demographic skews female (60%), and 63% of their users are 18 years old and older.  They also claim that their average member spends approximately 20 minutes a day on their site – and 45% of them are visiting the site more than once a day).  43% of their members are Caucasian and 38% are African American.