Social networking in the UK

For a view of Britain's social-networking scene, see this Times of London piece picked up in The Australian. The social Web is huge in the UK, where Piczo has grown eightfold in 13 months from 1.2 million to 10.5 million users worldwide, and the music-sharing site Last.fm gets 5 million visitors a month, up from 3 million a year ago. Britain's top 3, the Times says, are Bebo.com, MySpace.com, and Faceparty.com (for people 16+), respectively. Some interesting notables about Faceparty: The site offers "adult verification" for people 19+ who wish to pay $3.25 pounds ($6.30) a month for access to content on the site). Another interesting revenue stream for Faceparty is I-Protect, which (at about $33/year) protects a member's photos from being uploaded to other people's pages. Users can also buy premium tech support (if this includes customer support, I can see it becoming a social-site revenue stream supported by parents and educators worldwide!).