I recently heard that people were talking about Tagged for some odd reason. I decided to investigate and see why. I mean, Tagged is a pretty nice social networking site, but it’s definitely no Facebook or Myspace. It didn’t appear they had made any major updates, so why were people talking about it?

My search led me to an article on Nielsenwire that talked about the top 10 social networking sites ranked by the time users spent on the sites. It was primarily about Facebook and Myspace, which is to be expected, but Tagged showed up as number 4 in the rankings chart.

Now, 4th is not that far from first and definitely not last, so it seems a bunch of people were trying to figure out exactly what this Tagged thing is. I mean, it actually beat Twitter at something so it must be important, right?

What’s even more interesting is that so many people haven’t heard about Tagged. Their marketing practices border on spam and are extremely viral. I don’t even recall how I got tricked into signing up. The way it works is that, during the sign-up process, you are given the option to put in your email credentials so that Tagged can then spam invite your friends. You may recognize this tactic from many of the Facebook apps you’ve dealt with. Your friends end up receiving an email that looks something like this:

Tagged says they have about 70 million users and Compete says they have almost 5 million unique visits per month, so I’m thinking this strategy has been working. The 3 things that stand out about it:

• Someone sent you photos. Don’t you feel special? Who doesn’t want to see photos?
• They told me I have to click! Look at that big shiny Yes button.
• Oh Noes! I’m going to make my friend sad if I don’t click Yes

In all seriousness, Tagged is kind of addictive. Maybe it’s the simple interface. Maybe it’s the match game. Maybe it’s just because I keep getting friended by hot chicks interesting people. Either way, there is something about Tagged that keeps people coming.

What do you know about Tagged?