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Social Networking on a grand scale

Society is an interesting concept. I guess at a very broad level, it is a bunch of creatures that spend time together, do things together, help each other and so on. In the world of the Internet, there have been many different social networks. There was friendster. There was hi5. There is linkedin. There's orkut. And now there is the mother of it all, facebook.

Why do we flock to these social networking sites? Well, I am no psychologist or anything, so don't look to me for a serious answer. I think people go to these sites because they allow you to keep in touch with real people. You know, those people you went to school with, those people you played softball with... those people. We go there to renew acquaintances, catch up on gossip, as a creativity outlet to read, write and heck, even draw.

I think this will be one of the big changes to the web. It has gone on for a while now, this web 2.0 business... people are having an easier time creating content and publishing it easily, blogs, social networking and so on. There are even sites where you can publish news; I think Reuters is starting to use regular folk's news reports as part of their wire service...

Anyway, getting back to facebook. The makers and maintainers of facebook have done a grand job of creating a site that allows many North Americans to keep in touch. It remains to be seen if the world is as accepting of this technology. Things like mobile facebook are a good first step. We shall see how it goes...
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