Just what the world needed - another social network. And this one, Sonetus, comes complete with an outrageous premise - they'll pay you for referring your friends to the network.

Sonetus is brand-spanking new - it seems to have launched somewhere around January 6th, 2010 - and the designers probably shouldn't have opened it up for public consumption yet. The language pack files are completely incomplete - just look at this poll that shows up on the social network's homepage:

Oops. Usually it's a good idea to make sure that your social network is actually working properly before you start advertising that users can get paid for referring their friends to it.

The lack of language pack files isn't the only problem with the site. There are, at present, less than 200 members on Sonetus - meaning that users haven't exactly leaped at the chance to refer their friends for the promise of cold, hard cash. There are several "tiers" of membership on the site, but we couldn't really make much sense of it since the language pack files were missing. It seems that the more members you refer, the larger a payout you're entitled to receive, but beyond that there wasn't much legible information.

If you're thinking that referring friends to social networks for cash sounds too good to be true, you're probably right. Sonetus' only source of traffic-based revenue seems to be Google Adsense blocks - and if monetizing a social network were really that easy, the big guys like Facebook and Myspace would already have found a profitable business model based on the ponzi-scheme architecture that Sonetus uses. In order for Sonetus to make any money, they'll need to pull in more revenue than they're paying out to users - and that just doesn't seem particularly likely, given how small Sonetus' user base is and how little coverage they're receiving (in fact, when we tried to research Sonetus, we couldn't find a single English-language site discussing the fledgling social network).

For now, it seems, the promise of ponzi-scheme based social networking is not more than smoke and mirrors. Out of sheer curiosity, we'll be keeping an eye on Sonetus, but we don't expect to hear anything big about them, and as their hosting costs continue to mount without any large source of revenue beyond Adsense placements, they might not be around for long.

If you're really looking to make money off of social networking, you're probably going to have to do a lot more than simply refer friends. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is - but that doesn't mean that there isn't any money to be found in social networking. Many social networking application developers see solid profits; the makers of Farmville, for example, are laughing all the way to the bank, with over 60 million people playing the game on Facebook. If you want to make money off of social networking, you're going to have to do it the old fashioned way - with a little hard work.