Are there really this many social media websites?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was browsing on a real estate site, and clicked on the Browse & Share link, and was surprised to find scores of social media websites to choose from. Usually, there are a dozen or so well known names, but most of these I have never heard of:

No, some of those are not strictly social media sites, like Amazon; but i assume there is a social media forum on Amazon where the link gets shared, so I am including sites like that as social media.

When did this happen? Are these all current, or are most of them defunct already? Do we need this many social media sites? Do they REALLY think they are going to compete with Facebook and Twitter?

Few of them could ever hope to be profitable, and must be black holes for investors. Yet someone is ponying up the capital to try to be the next Facebook. I am just amazed that in these economic times, there is still enough venture capital or other seed money to throw after dubious websites.

2

Not all of those are social media sites. Bit.ly is a URL shortening site. Some of those are email sites (Google, Hotmail, Yahoo). Some of the others look like bookmark sites - Diigo is one, I believe.

Some of them are different sorts of social media:
Tumblr, Livejournal, and Wordpress are blogging sites
Digg and Reddit are news aggregates (sort of?)
Pinterest is for sharing hobbies and interests

That seems like an incredibly ridiculous list and I can’t see any good reason for having ALL of them, but they’re not all just Facebook clones.