Hook-ups: something the Internet has made possible for any two people to the farthest reaches of the Earth. But it’s not just about love, it’s about building a network.  Some choose to network to build a friend base, feeling loved when they’ve been “friended” by a certain number of people.  But more and more often, this first-social environment has become a mechanism of true use in the business world.

MySpace is five years old now, and showing the scars of its journey. While users could build their own Web page years ago on Tripod or Geocities, they were often unwieldy and not particularly sophisticated, with ad space taking up part of the pages. MySpace was much more readily accessible to the average non-geek—and it was pretty! (Or pretty horrendous, depending what the user added.)

More importantly, the MySpace pages could be changed at will, decorated with thousands of pictures, surveys, personality tests and more. For the first time users could embed music and video. It’s possible to set it up so both music AND video play at the same time—perhaps not the most well-intended feature.

Another common complaint is the spam generated by MySpace users in seemingly- innocent “friend requests.” When a user is part of the MySpace Community, he has the opportunity to surf through others’ pages as well, and perhaps find common interests. He may then send a request to the person he’s found, asking if he can be listed on the Friends section of that other person’s MySpace page.

But for users like Kim Walton, a culinary student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, she finds that she receives an average of 18 emails a day, three that are genuine. The rest are from spammers. Sometimes it’s a request from one of the many musical groups who host MySpace pages who find they make music similar to music she likes and want to introduce her to new artists.  Sometimes it’s just invitation to porn sites.

So why link up with a stranger?  Good question.

Beth Steiner, who directs residential programming for Sierra Nevada Journeys, an environmental camp outside Reno, Nevada, says she has both MySpace and Facebook, and checks into MySpace “about once a week” to catch up on what old friends are doing, but prefers Facebook, which she checks daily.

As she hires new personnel, however, she finds that both sites are a resource to her to learn more about potential employees, often information that was not revealed in the on-site interview. “I like to see what they’re up to socially,” she says.

Walton, too, says she prefers Facebook, and would recommend it to students. “There are less annoying middle schoolers on Facebook, and less creeps.”  She attributes the greater comfort level to better monitoring by the staff at Facebook, and their stricter acceptance policy for who can join. Users must use their true name, address and job information, which promotes verification.

This opinion is underscored in Scott Goldberg’s recent article for Digital Media Wire  which channels PhD student Danah Boyd from Cal Berkeley touting Facebook as a place for winners and MySpace as a place for losers. “Social networks,” Goldberg says, “converge with age when priorities shift from one’s image in the eyes of others to career and future.”

Facebook requires more effort on the part of users to build a network. David Kirkpatrick of Fortune Magazine says it takes “between 50 and 75 friends before you achieve the critical mass that allows you to begin enjoying Facebook and getting useful and interesting News Feed messages.”  While many college students had an automatic list, i.e., everyone enrolled at their college, adult users have to add their friends singly.

The News Feed, Kirkpatrick says, is one of the more interesting features of Facebook, in that it provides you, without asking, a daily update on what your chosen friends are doing.

The computer algorithm divines which of your friends you are most interested in based on history of communication, number of times you’ve visited their page, etc., and a user then receives more updates about those persons.

Facebook also has game applications such as Scrabulous, which allow their members to game against each other. Shawna Coronado, a gardening editor and environmental commissioner from the Chicago area, says that Facebook allows her to interact with people from a wide base on a daily basis.

“I have a lot of people who play games with me daily or send me notes regularly because we share similar interests. If I have a problem with gardening, or my kids, or my writing, or my biz - I can go to these friends and tap into their help networks.”

She, however, prefers LinkedIn for business. “LinkedIn is an amazing business tool,” she said. “I've been connected in my current business with LinkedIn people who want advice and/or need a Landscape Designer. LinkedIn gives them a short history on who I am and what I am doing, so they come to me with issues which might be centric to my history.”

Previous to her current work, she was a recruiter, and she says she found LinkedIn to be an amazing resource. ”I could tap into my LinkedIn pool of friends any time I had a job to list. They would refer me on to people they knew who needed a job.”

Her email box is often full. “I'd say from both a social and networking perspective I get tons of emails. Some of them lead to jobs for me in the future, but quite often I utilize these connections to help others within my network. I can help them find a job, or help them with a problem/issue. In return, they help me as well. We are scratching each others backs. Life is short - in my opinion, we all need to scratch each others backs so we can help each other succeed.”

Groups such as Pennwriters, Inc., are also touting LinkedIn as an important tool for networking. “Your network becomes an audience at your fingertips: they are the first people to tell when you publish new work or participate in an event,” says Nate Hardy, Internet Activities Coordinator of the writers’ organization. He and Pennwriters area representative Jade Leone Blackwater set up a LinkedIn hub for the group and invited the members to join.

“We like LinkedIn because it is free, easy-to-use, has minimal advertising (no pop-ups or pop-unders) and generates no spam,” he says.

Seamus McCauley, points out, however, that LinkedIn is not MySpace for grownups. “So here's the problem with LinkedIn - it doesn't do anything. You sign up, you find some colleagues, you link to them and then...nothing.”

Like any other sort of networking, LinkedIn takes a committed effort on the user’s part to build the network; the difference is instead of having to schmooze at 200 real-world parties, she can do it all from the comfort of her own laptop.

But LinkedIn isn’t the be-all and end-all either. Up and coming is iGoogle, with its OpenSocial platform. Anyone can develop gadgets for OpenSocial, and as a result there are now over 75,000 different things that can be added to a user’s iGoogle page, including the 3:14 “Easter eggs,” odd little things that happen at 3:14, like monsters and aliens appearing out of nowhere.

A user doesn’t have to be a professional engineer to create a gadget—there’s a gadgetmaker widget that walks you through the creation process for something just for your own page, or to share with the world.

The most recent touch to iGoogle, added in April, was the ability to add a free theme from one of 70 different commercial artists to the page.
Google continues with a big OpenSocial event in San Francisco at the end of May, pulling its many developers together for a brainfest.

The bottom line, of course, is the bottom line. Any application out there is going to be used to make money. As more businesspeople find one or another of these platforms useful to them in terms of making the contacts that make them money, they will tend to cluster there.

But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have an attractive site, with the widgets you need to make yourself feel complete and broadcast something of your personality to the cyberworld. Whatever you want, it’s out there.