These days for millions of people the internet has become our town square, our quilting bee, and our local watering hole all at once. It’s no wonder that the most visited websites out there are MySpace and Facebook. The idea behind these sites of course, is to allow people to stay connected with their group of friends & family and of course social networking with new folks as well.

As it was with blogging some years back, forward thinking companies are taking steps into the networked world. Trak Kayaks has begun their “Friends of Trak” group on Facebook and already has a nice group of over 100 people. Members can chat about their boats, share pictures, get the latest information from Trak and of course network with other members along the way. Good idea for a company that wants to stay in touch with their customers. Yes, you do have to have a Facebook account to access their group. I have a Facebook profile just so i can check in on the Trak site.

For my part, I’ve played around with social networking as well. I put a site up on Yahoo360 and limited access to only those I wanted in. That gave me a way to write more about the things I wanted to write about that were way off the kayak trail. Then when Y360 announced they were changing their system, I along with thousands of others moved my stuff to Multiply which is a very simple to manage networking site. (My site is here) In fact a couple paddlers have found me over there already! The advantage of a site like this is that i can store everything easily in one spot; video clips, photos, blogs, links, whatever. You don’t need to be web savvy to do it. You also have the advantage of making anything on the site only available to those people in your network that you wish to have access. Then when you add content an announcement is posted to a bulletin board to people on your “network”. They of course can comment on your site in general or about any specific item. Usually these sites have functions to allow you to post from your cellphone as well. It’s a great way to stay connected.

These days when we tend to have lots of material on the web, a network site makes a lot of sense. It’s much better than having videos in one place, photos in another, blogs in another, and on and on. Which site you use certainly depends on what you are looking for. Research has shown that Myspace tends to be a younger crowd whereas Facebook tends to trend toward college students, business, and the more affluent among us. Multiply, even with 6 million users is a bit of a quiet backwater, which suits me just fine. Certainly online networking is not for everyone. Computers are not for everyone either! But for those of us who do spend a lot of time in the online world a social networking website can be an enjoyable place to talk to friends, make new ones and store all your stuff.