Badoo

badoo Badoo is a social network with some interesting trimmings. The image viewer is filled with AJAXy goodness, and a voting interface, for those of you who need reassurance from people you’ve never met that you’re either ugly or attractive. The messaging interface is chat based, which is a hell of a lot more intuitive than Facebook or MySpace… and I think the whole profile set up is straight forward, hell I spent 7 minutes on it, and had it all loaded down with more info about me than anyone would ever want to read.

From what I can tell, the site is geared toward sharing photos and making social connections quickly. There are areas for comments and there are some Internet-popularity-contest components, if you’re into that sort of thing; but all-in-all, the interface is VERY fast and well done.

Key features:

Full featured Friends organization with custom folders options
Lightbox-like photo viewing
Thumbnail resizing with a slider
“Entry”(public message) creation with quick sharing
Customizable interests and information
View profile visitors
Ranking system
Chat-based messaging
On-the-fly traffic conter
Personalized URL

There are about 12 million users, globally, making this site less bloated than MySpace or Facebook, making it a much less spam loaded experience. Done.