Brewed Fresh Daily

Ryze's chief mission is to connect its 120,000 registered users for business reasons. "It's the whole golf and business thing," Mr. Scott said. "Or the water cooler in business, where you have those soft interaction points. People connect as people, not just as business entities." Ryze's approach is similar to that of other social networking sites. Registrants set up personal Web pages to communicate with current and prospective business contacts. A typical personal page might include photos and graphics, along with a r�sum�-like description of business and academic achievements, before going into personal hobbies and other nonbusiness topics. From there, users can build a network of "friends of friends" by visiting pages of acquaintances and asking permission to include their names on a list there. Other sites, like LinkedIn, recognize the degrees of separation between people more overtly and have referral mechanisms to ease introductions. Users of Ryze and other sites also frequently join an industry-specific network, where they can post to message boards and establish new contacts. Ryze earns money by selling gold memberships which, for $10 a month, allow users to search the site more extensively than nonpaying members can. (Mr. Scott would not disclose the number of gold members.) For $6, Ryze members may place ads for jobs and other services atop message boards and in the site's classified ads section for 30 days.

Wow. That's quite a few more then I thought. Since Cleveland started having mixers, the number of Ryzers has tripled to 600+, and those are only the people who fill out the location info on their page. Ryze doesn't require that info, so who know how many actually users there are here.