I think I’ve found a social networking thing that works for me. Most of them have left me cold, and the ones I liked – orkut, for instance – never got much traction and thus collapsed. Recently I received a prompt from a friend to join Facebook, so as a test I gave it my gmail address book to see who was already on. I was rewarded with a big list of people from my travelling days. So I signed up, got back in easy contact with all of them, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the whole Facebook interface and system.
Facebook has also, just recently, broken out of the North-American-college-student demographic and gone much much wider. Whether this is a temporary surge or a long-term thing I don’t know, but right now Facebook is my pick for the social networking site that will still be thriving in five years when MySpace and Bebo and Hi5 and all have succumbed. On the other hand, Warren Ellis – who is good at this stuff – thinks Facebook is useless, so I might be proved hideously wrong. Anyway: my profile.
(Besides, social networking sites will only really take off when they become native features of a cellphone network, which is a good few years away yet.)
Also, from the Onion: MySpace outage leaves millions friendless.