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Today I’d like to take a break from statistics and analyses to make a few recommendations of quality social networks that are useful and applicable for most of us. Here’s a brief introduction to five communities that will help you meet similar people from your community, share travel tips/recommendations, organize your social sphere, make a difference on global issues, and stay in good shape.

• Meetup – Expand your network in your city
  

  Meetup is the perfect place to meet, network, and learn from people in your city that share similar interests. Meetup currently has 7.2 million members that organize 250,000 meetups each month. I have personally found that Meetup organizers tend to put in quite a bit of effort to ensure their group’s meetups have quality presentations and get-togethers with high attendance.

• Gogobot - Share travel recommendations and experiences
  

  Gogobot is a young startup in social travel that aims to make travel planning easy, fun, and social. You will find that they do just that… simply type in a destination and you’ll find a beautifully presented place page with advice, pictures, and places to stay or visit at the particular destination.

• Google Plus – Get control of how you connect with your social space
  

  Google Plus has been the buzz in the social networking scene since it launched its private beta version at the end of June. Already Google’s full-feature social network has acquired over 10 million users that share over 1 Billion items per day! Google Plus offers many cool features, but it’s most distinguishing feature is the ability to easily subdivide your social circles and choose who you’d like to share particular content with. While other major social networks allow some privacy controls, the ease-of-use and full integration of ‘circles’ into Google Plus goes a long way to solve the problem of unwanted mixing content from friends, family, business, and other social spheres.

• Care2 – Make a difference in environmental and social issues
  

  Care2 is one of several communities that employ the power of social information-sharing and crowdsourcing to make a difference. Care2 offers over 16 million users a place to donate, join petitions, and take action to promote change. It also provides healthy and green news, tips, and other resources to become educated on social issues as well as a job-finder and volunteer opportunities at socially responsible companies.

• Dailymile – Encourage each other to achieve fitness goals through running, cycling, and swimming
  

  Dailymile maintains a simple community to share workouts and find routes. While many other fitness networks provide more advanced mechanisms to track workouts, Dailymile’s simplicity is probably its greatest strength. By keeping its purpose focused, it makes it easy for users to actually keep up with their logs, routes, and the community… which is good in an area in which consistency and routine are the biggest keys to success.

These are five good networks that address common needs, but there are many more… What networks would you recommend that we could all benefit from?