Hey everybody – here’s a cool bit of news on Tagged.

Experian Hitwise, a well-known company that measures web site traffic, recently issued new stats for the top social networking sites in the US.

We thought you’d be interested to hear that they report Tagged’s market share for in the social networking category is up by almost 50% since last year. This is as good for us as it is for you. Obviously, we’re excited because our business keeps growing. And it’s great for our community, too, because Tagged users like you just increased the number of people you can discover!

Over the past decade we’ve watched Internet companies come and go, and it is interesting to see how some companies soar into the stratosphere—only to crash back to earth almost as fast. At Tagged, our progress has been different. It’s been slow and methodical. And that’s just fine with us. Since we started the company five years ago this month, we’ve tried to stay true to our original goal: to fulfill the original promise of the Internet by turning strangers into friends.

It seems to be working.

In fact, one of the things we’ve noticed—and commentators are talking about this more and more lately—is that traditional social networking sites can sometimes pull you into the past rather than push you into the future. It’s fun to connect with everybody from high school, but once that’s done, and you find out what everybody is doing 5, 10 or 20 years later, what’s next? With Tagged, it’s all about social discovery, about meeting new people—people you’d have never met in high school, even people from the far corners of the planet if you want to travel that far. That’s what we like most about Tagged: The possibilities for new friends are infinite.

So thanks again for sticking with us. Over the next few months we’ll be sharing some new features with you that are sure to make your experience on Tagged even richer.