Most of us are familiar (addicted to) many social network sites by now. I’ve worked my way through the years and fashions, from Friendsreunited, to Friendster, Myspace and finally, for now, Facebook and Twitter.

Sitting alongside the standard social network sites and the consumer generated media are a number of interesting applications. These allow us to do more with the information that social sites and media sites make available, to add to it, to organise it and to feed into it.

Many apps are fun, more are simply annoying, but once in a while we stumble across one or two that might actually useful.

In no particular order I give you my current favourite web based social media apps and mashups.

Google Latitude

The latest craze in the social network sphere is GPS. Google have launched a new update to the popular Google maps app that lets you view the position of your friends via your mobile phone or PC. Use it to see who’s just round the corner and available for a drink, or to find out if that late for work colleague really is stuck on the train.

Tabbloid

First there was printed news, then printed news went online, then tehre was consumer generated media online, and now you can have your online only consumer generated news sent to you electronically each day as a .pdf to read in print. New skool news, old skool format…are you keeping up?

Trendrr

Data fiend? Just can’t get enough stats and charts? Simply type in search terms you want to compare and Trendrr pulls information from news sites, social networks, search engines, aggregators, and other sources. It populates hundreds of preset charts, tables and graphs. Sit back, browse, find what you need and share. It’s the no sweat approach to online data analytics. Information is largely simple, but can be interesting.

Digg

Digg is old news, but it serves up new and interesting news. Can you Digg it? Yes you can and thousands do. Many news sites offer a Digg function where you register your interest in a story, alternatively you can do this through the Digg site. The more people do this the higher up the ranking the news goes.

TweetNews

This site combines articles appearing on Yahoo news with what’s being talked about on Twitter. A simple search function provides insight into the level of comments on Twitter, looking at the relationship between the two could push stories to the fore as soon as they break.

Cursebird

When is comes to social networking apps there’s the good, the bad and the ugly…and then there’s Cursebird. This application pulls feeds from all non private Twitter posts (that’s most of them) searches them for expletives and collates them in real-time. Useful? Not really. Funny…you bet your @ss. Office safe..unlikely.

Some other sites of note

Yammer

Like Twitter but for business. Yammer focuses on organisation, and only individuals with the same corporate email address can join a given network

Twittersheep 

Enter your Twitter username to see a word cloud based on the bios of your twitter flock.

Tweetlater

Set up your tweets now for automatic posting later.

Wordle

Quickly generate a tag cloud from any URL page

Social Mention

Who is being mentioned where in social media, quick multiple media type search.

We'd be intrested to hear about the latest sites and social media apps that you're using.