2007: The year of social networking

Social networking sites like MySpace are among the most popular destinations on the web, attracting millions of members and millions of dollars in investment.

Are these online communities the future face of Web 2.0, as their proponents claim, or just another passing fad? What's driving their popularity and how will they develop in the future?

MySpace boasts more than 100 million members worldwide. According to market research firm Hitwise, MySpace accounts for 4.6 per cent of all visits to US web pages, more than Yahoo and even more than Google.

Facebook, popular with US college students, generates more page views than Amazon's US shop. The UK's most popular social site, Bebo, boasts 26 million members worldwide.

Big audiences attract big investment. MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580m in July 2005.

Google bought video-sharing site YouTube in October for $1.65bn, while Bebo is rumoured to be in talks with media giant Viacom at a price tag close to $1bn.

No one can deny that social networking is the web phenomenon du jour, especially among the young. That is no surprise: 18-35 year olds are the most active online and many cannot remember the world before web access.

But online communities are not new. Before the web, academics and computer nerds used dial-up lines to gather on bulletin-boards. In the US, sites like Buzz-Oven, based on the Texas music scene, are as old as the web itself.

The UK's first mass-market taste of social networking was Friends Reunited, which provided the low-down on what your old school mates were up to.

But it is youth-oriented sites like MySpace and Bebo that are growing the fastest. Alicia, 16, is a member of Bebo, visiting the site sporadically. "You can put on the music you like, chat, write quizzes, whatever you want," she says.

Alicia uses Bebo to keep in touch with friends who have moved away, but also to chat with people she sees every day at school. An erstwhile pen-friend, who is now a fellow Beboer, is the only online friend she's never met.

A lot of the activity on Bebo and MySpace is about young people establishing their identity. These are 'my musical tastes', 'pictures of my friends', 'my likes and dislikes'. This is me. Or at least, the face I want to present.

Arguably, this fulfils a valuable social function. The confident are there, as they would be wherever an audience gathers to applaud their talents. But so are the wall-flowers and the misfits, receiving a share of attention they wouldn't get from conventional social interactions.

Saying who you are, what you're thinking, what you're feeling is a lot less scary when you're telling a computer screen than the wide-eyed faces of intimacy-phobic mates.

Michael Birch, the 36-year old San Francisco-based British founder of Bebo, argues that social sites help young people to learn how to communicate and develop multi-media publishing skills.

But teens are notoriously fickle: fashions, friends, music and fads rise and fall with alarming velocity. Will social sites last?

"Bebo is bitchier than a school playground," says Beth, 18, already disillusioned with the scene. "It's full of boys trying to be cool and tweenies posing in their underwear and lipstick."

Sites that accrue a wide demographic are less vulnerable to the capricious cool factor. Older people are increasingly frequenting social sites. About 36 per cent of MySpace users are aged 35-54, according to comScore Media Metrix.

One group which hopes that social sites will continue to flourish is the advertisers, attracted to huge, potentially lucrative, young audiences. If there's a predictable future for the big social networking sites, it is as a marketing vehicle.

So-called youth brands such as Sony, Coca-Cola and Apple have found success promoting their wares on social sites and not just through conventional advertising.

Apple sponsors a Mac-help group on Facebook, which was established independently by US college students.

Kids don't buy stuff because they see an ad. They buy things their coolest peers have got. What better way to find out what's hot and what's not than checking out the cool people's likes and dislikes lists?

This is similar to the 'influencers' used by record labels and brands such as Nike in the early 1990s.

Influencers in their late teens and early 20s were, and still are, paid largish sums of money to sample their peer-group zeitgeist and talk up the wares of their paymasters.

Using social networking marketing is seen as a brave move to make a brand relevant to young people. Well, that's how marketers present it. But it could also be interpreted as another example of the commercialisation of youth,

Advertisers hijack new trends so they can peddle their wares to the young and gullible, in much the same way that popular music, video games, skateboarding, graffiti and many other 'youth activities' are subverted to serve the dark legions of the corporation.

But restless young people will find ways to avoid the marketing machine as it chases them relentlessly from one cool thing to the next.

There's probably at least one 15 year-old 'nu-goth' expressing that opinion on MySpace right now, before he sets up his own rival site.

'Yoof' marketing
JP Morgan Chase markets credit cards to students through Facebook, and Burger King gives away free episodes of Fox Entertainment programmes on MySpace.

Even the UK government is participating. Earlier in October, it launched a spoof band called Baackpain on MySpace to raise awareness of back injuries.

Sometimes it backfires. In May 2005 Proctor & Gamble tried to create a social site around its Sparkle Body Spray product, populated with fake characters like 'Rose' and 'Vanilla'. But the kids smelt the ruse a mile off.

Social sites in Asia
English-language sites dominate the web in terms of member numbers, but the phenomenon is by no means unique to the language.

Japan's Mixi has five million users and is the third most popular site in Japan behind Yahoo and Google. Mixi is for over-18s only who become members by referral.

In South Korea Cyworld has 19 million members, 40 per cent of South Korea's population. The site generates money not just through advertising but by selling members 'digital decorations', or music and graphics for their homepages.

WangYou has eight million members in China. Government restrictions mean that WangYou staff have to watch all uploaded videos and monitor the site stringently.

Online communities predicted
Before the web took off as a consumer phenomenon, State-side pundits like Howard Rheingold and Nicholas Negroponte predicted the death of conventional communities.

People would no longer gather in physical locations for work, entertainment or shopping, they'd do it all online, said the cyber-prophets. Thus communities would form around online activities and interests rather than geographical.

Even intimate liaisons would be conducted online, said some Cassandras, using teledildonics (cyber-sex suits that stimulated the body in a simulation of the sexual act) while we conversed with partners, real or virtual, anywhere on the globe.