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Verba, who previously worked at AOL, is wary of crass or inappropriate commercialisation of Piczo. “We need to monetise it in a respectful and smart way,” he said. “Our users own us and we don’t own them. We’d better listen very carefully to them. Hopefully, if we are serving our demographic, they will stay with us.”

That still leaves plenty of opportunities for what Verba calls “immersive brand campaigns”. Piczo has worked with entertainment companies and brands such as Sony and Nintendo — in some cases offering video clips or pictures to those who show interest in a product.

One interesting example is the Piczo mini-site that accompanied the launch of Justin Timberlake’s album FutureSex/LoveSounds. Users could cut and paste a video for Timberlake’s single into their Piczo page. “We will do these kinds of promotions until the cows come home,” said Verba.

Verba is tight-lipped on the specifics but admits that some of these deals generate tens of thousands of pounds, and “our rates continue to climb”.

Wayn.com — the name is derived from Where are you now? — allows users to share travel advice, which they might use to plan a holiday or just a good evening out. The site, which has just raised £5.7m of investment funding, is already profitable thanks to the 100,000 subscribers who pay for additional tools and functionality.

Pete Ward, one of the co-founders, said: “We have created a service which is useful for those who don’t pay but provides value for those who do.”

For £7.50 a month or £23.88 a year, subscribers can send unlimited messages, upload more photos and use Wayn’s maps and advanced search features.

Wayn received its original backing from Steve Pankhurst, the co-founder of Friends Reunited, the school and college-based site that was an early version of social networking on the web. But Ward draws a distinction between Wayn’s approach and that of Friends Reunited which, he said, keeps everything of value for paying members and discourages use by (and valuable traffic from) non-subscribers.

Since a relaunch in March 2005, Wayn has grown from fewer than 50,000 users to 7m, adding 650,000 more in October. In contrast, Friends Reunited, now owned by ITV, “is haemorrhaging market share”, said Heather Hopkins at Hitwise. “There’s not a lot of buzz out there about them.”

Last.fm has some of the most intriguing commercial possibilities. It is just starting to tease insights from the huge database of listening habits that it is building. For fun and publicity, it recently pointed out that Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire is currently the most played song in Iraq (because of the American army’s presence). More significantly, it can spot which acts are rising or falling in popularity. This may be highly valuable to the record companies.

In the meantime, Last.fm is making money through advertising, from selling CDs and music downloads, and from subscriptions that guarantee no ads and better computer connections.

My Space, Bebo, Piczo and others are all keenly exploring ways to move social networking on to the mobile phone — an inevitable development because of increasing handset capabilities.

The mobile-phone group 3 is experimenting with its own version, called Kink Kommunity. “Be the biggest show-off you can!” it challenges. Graeme Oxby at 3 said Kink had attracted more than 50,000 UK subscribers paying £1.99 a month.

Verba said: “If you had looked at Google five years ago, you would have said the same thing that people say today about My Space: that it’s a good business but the revenues are small.

“Is that going to be a huge business five years from now? Can I tell you for sure that My Space succeeds or that Piczo succeeds? I can’t. But the audience is online in the Piczos and the My Spaces and the Bebos of the world. The dollars will follow.”