Hypercompendia

Referring again to Wikipedia's information on the social networks set up and their reported membership, it appears that something is available for just about every interest. While many of the main organizations are wide open and non-specific, they usually have within the whole a large number of groups or communities formed based on common interests. The larger groups such as Facebook and MySpace boast memberships (at least according to Wikipedia) of 125,000,000 (Facebook) and 245,000,000 (MySpace). Flickster, Classmates.com, Black Planet, are more dedicated to specific topics and still number in the 20-50 million member range.

Some folk are on a number of different networks, but I personally find it more trouble to spread out than to find a single 'home base' even though naturally all the networks can be interlinked so that updating one automatically sends the data to the others.

As soon as one system becomes 'hot' there are any number of widgets and sites that create enhancements or capabilities beyond the orginal. Twitter is one of the most simple and basic systems of communication, yet there have been widgets that enable writing from the desktop, finding out why someone's 'dumped' you (Quitter), and I've just been advised of a means to form groups within the Twitter community.

With us all tied together in this giant spider web city that covers the world, there's bound to be a widely diverse group of folk involved; old and young, artsy, literary, religious, political, moms and teachers and students and teenagers, and . . . weirdos.

The anonymity of the internet leaves itself open to abuse and it comes to a large degree from spammers that leave comments or trackbacks, mainly to gain numbers that I don't truly understand or care to figure out. There are less anonymous commenters to weblogs for example, that aren't looking for followers but rather some form of celebrity by being argumentative or outrageous. This is the price we pay for communication. There are ways around it, but it is an annoyance in any case.

Most users of any social network are there for any number of reasons including sharing information, seeking data, camaraderie, validation, etc., but within each I suspect two things are essential as a force: the story within each of us, and the need to be heard.