Salon.com on social networking online

Andrew Leonard of Salon.com delivers a social networking primer and profiles the different approaches of big name social networking sites such as Friendster, Tribe.net, and Orkut. Marc Canter is mentioned as social networking taken to the extreme but there is no mention of Friend of a Friend (FOAF) or how to move common data between social networking providers. The article does a good job examining the privacy trade-offs when a user provides a profile to an online site. “Promise someone a date, or a chance at a job, and they’ll happily expose their most intimate secrets.”