Social networking sites are the latest internet phenomenon. But have we really got that much to talk about?

Tom Anderson is a 30-year-old single guy from Santa Monica, California. He’s a Libran who doesn’t smoke or drink. His favourite artists include Michael Jackson (before he turned 14) and current Radio One favourites Fall Out Boy. Oh, and at my last count, Tom had 78149679 friends and makes several new ones every day.

This is because Tom Anderson is the musician turned internet whiz kid who set up MySpace, the largest and most successful of the growing number of social networking sites aimed at the teen and twenties market. The site was bought for $580m (£332.85m) last year by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, so maybe it’s not surprising that Tom has so many friends.

Since its creation in October 2003, MySpace has gone from having no registered users to the almost 80 million that were waiting to greet me when I signed up. Every new member who creates a profile automatically gets Tom as a ‘friend,’ linking their MySpace profile page with his. Not everyone likes this – t-shirts with the slogan, ‘Tom is not my friend,’ are currently doing the rounds – but this is how I know his personal details. We’ve never spoken. This is also how I know that there were at least 78149678 other people out there in MySpace when I created my profile. No doubt this figure has since risen.

MySpace and similar sites like Facebook, which was set up in February 2004, are now among the most trafficked on the internet. Facebook – a slightly more exclusive site being that only university and high school students can join – has more than 7.5 million registered users. These sites are essentially cool places to hang out in virtual reality. Although each has its specifics, they are all basically huge, rapidly expanding clubs of (mostly) young people. They are places where members can meet their friends’ friends and swap photos, stories, music files, and maybe even saliva. My ‘welcome to MySpace!’ email invited me to join in the blogging, games, and rating of “hotties.” And members can do all of this – except the swapping saliva part – without leaving their homes.

The key thing about these sites is that they allow people to surf through potentially millions of other lives. So making sure your profile is up-to-scratch is vital. First you choose the best picture of yourself to upload. Then you enter as many of your personal details as you want. Then you have the option of listing as many of your favourite bands, artists, films, books and so on, as you desire. MySpace also offers you the option of customizing your profile to make it as eye-catching as possible.

Once you are satisfied with your profile you are ready to interact. You can add photos, swap music files, write about your latest antics in your blog, search for other friends’ based on your interests, find a picture of someone you fancy and add a juicy comment to their profile, and join groups based on anything from your favourite artist to being paid to fill out online surveys. The options are endless and offer unrestricted access to other people’s lives on a scale unrivalled by any other medium. You can find out about a person’s tastes, personality, and even relationship history with just a click of a mouse. You can talk to pretty much anyone without opening your mouth.

In an age of Friends Reunited, online dating services, and countless Heat-style gossip magazines, it is no surprise that these sites audiences, who are largely in the 12-24 age bracket, return so often. Two-thirds of Facebook users check the site every day. Many users claim to be “addicted” to them – Tom Anderson’s MySpace profile includes several comments of this nature. One guy congratulates him on creating “the best waste of time I could possibly spend.” There’s a group on Facebook called “Facebook is taking over my life and MSN is polishing off the remains.” Enough said. Anderson’s profile boasted 54626 comments on my first visit. Not many people can claim to have that many friends, virtual or otherwise, although members do try, linking as many friends as possible in a bid to look popular.

These sites started in the USA, but inevitably where the US leads, much of the rest of the world follows. Facebook is now available to several UK universities and the number of schools and universities supported by the site is growing. MySpace’s members are from all over the world, and there is now a specific MySpace UK site. On a smaller scale, there are many local sites with varying degrees of notoriety that perform similar functions. London’s gumtree site, for example, is fundamentally a place for members to find housing in the capital but its message boards, like Facebook’s interest-related groups, give people the opportunity to reach others whether they are looking for gig-listings, football memorabilia or casual sex.

With improved technology and greater access to all sorts of people, it is hardly groundbreaking to say that the internet is changing the way we communicate, with more avenues of communication available every year. However, users of these sites point out that they can create real-life relationships, with some members even using them as dating services. MySpace’s ‘About’ page claims to be for “single people who want to meet other singles,” amongst other things. With so many online dating sites available this is perhaps not surprising, but they can boost more than your love life. MySpace’s music loving members can find out first-hand about gigs and unsigned bands, travelling across the country to support their favourites – just ask the Arctic Monkeys. Their number one single last year, I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor, seemed to appear on radio stations across the UK out of nowhere. In fact it was the result of three years of the band communicating with their fans online and encouraging people to swap files of their songs.

What is most significant about these sites is that their users seem completely comfortable with having their personal details available for strangers to browse through. The majority do not differentiate between online and offline lives. To hold entire conversations without speaking may seem strange to older generations, but it is an everyday occurrence for those for whom email and instant messaging has always been available. Some might argue that these avenues of communication are replacing face-to-face contact and increasing introversion among young people. With such increased access to unlimited TV channels and computer games, this is arguably a generation that doesn’t need any more reason to stay indoors. Not to mention the possible affect having entire communities at your fingertips could have on attention spans.

On the other hand, many users of these sites see them as an extension of their social lives rather than a replacement of them, arranging meetings and even dates online. Such sites create new communities of like-minded people and surely all forms of communication have their advantages and disadvantages. At least you can log out of MySpace if someone pisses you off.

Inevitably these sites are not without their detractors. They face the same criticisms as any internet space. MySpace in particular has become the target of a proposed law in America, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) that wants to ban social networking sites from computers in schools and libraries, the fear being that it makes it easy for predators to contact teens and children. Many would argue this is an issue about the internet in general rather than these sites in particular. It’s also a long way from the idealistic beginnings of the sites – while Facebook was started by three Harvard University students as a means for fellow students to connect, it is said that Tom Anderson’s initial idea for MySpace was to provide free web space to budding musicians and film-makers. However, MySpace’s new owner Rupert Murdoch responded to the fears of parents by purging MySpace of 200,000 of “objectionable” profiles. What this means for the site has yet to be seen, but it does raise questions of how a site that has built its reputation on an access all areas premise can police itself. As internet chatrooms were the focus of such fears a few years ago, so these sites pose perhaps even greater potential dangers, by having photographs and personal information accessible to anyone with an email address.

Although restrictions are necessary and all of these sites impose standard rules, as with internet chatrooms, much of the policing necessarily has to be done in the home. Murdoch’s purging of MySpace profiles seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to DOPA. Most users know it isn’t that easy to make the internet safe and critics of the proposed act point out that most children now have access to the internet at home – and how do you legislate for that?

These sites are still relatively new and could go the way of so many trends, consigned to the trash can on your Apple Mac computer. Whether they will survive their audiences growing up will be interesting. As yet, however, they show no signs of slowing. Perhaps the greatest danger is that communication will eventually break down completely as we all talk ourselves out. Instant messenger, email, text messaging, blogging, and now social networking websites – with so many ways to communicate with others, at some point, we must run out of things to say.