Your life, your life, your life, is my drug! [1]

It's an addiction isn't it? Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Xanga (for a nice throwback), all social networking sites that keep us awake 'till the latest hours of the night. After all, who wouldn't want to know about that awesome new car Brian just bought? Or that Sharon and Michael finally got engaged? Social Networking brings all of us together in an organized fashion, detailing every online move we make, every picture we post, and every status we update. Even the impressive Facebook "News feed" reports not only our actions, but the actions of nearly every one of our friends, filling the online logs with days worth of information with new posts every minute[2].

The backbone behind these sites are, of course, the users themselves. Without users to propagate the popularity of the sites, they fail, as seen by places such as sixdegrees.com, livejournal, and friendster [3]. What then, allows these mainstream social networking sites to succeed and carry on for over half a decade, while the others fizzled out within a year or two? It seems the age old phrase "knowledge is power" can be applied here, even if in a skewed sense.

With more, up-to-the-second updates, Facebook has become the biggest social networking site of the online era, followed closely by Myspace. Both these sites allow anyone to see any other users information and actions (with the proper privacy settings of course), and it seems this is what keeps us consistently coming back for more. By having the option to stay connected, even with those we don't even care about [4] we become part of a worldwide information hub, which, as seen in recent controversial debate, can lead to unfortunate consequences.

[1] Ke$ha.

[2] Westlake, E.J. "Friend Me If You Facebook". The Drama Review. 52:4, (2008). p. 21-31. Internet.

[3]Crump, J.W. "A look at Failed Social Networks", The Bivings Report. 5 Dec 2008. web. Jan 2011

[4]Huberman, B. A., Romero, D. M., & Wu, F. (2008, December 5). Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. Social Computing Laboratory, 1-9.