Every year in March, thousands of DJ’s and electronic music fans converge on Miami Beach for the Miami Music Multimedia (M3) Summit and competing show, the Winter Music Conference . In the end, it’s the beach by day and partying all night. I attend for another reason - to see Motorola’s cell phone music initiative.

Then I stumbled upon a panel discussion about MySpace that intrigued me more than any new cell phone. I’ve been a Friendster member for years, but lost interest almost immediately after I signing up. At the time, social networking and online communities didn’t interest me, but after Miami I just had to take the plunge and give both sites an honest try. Being new to Los Angeles, it seemed like a decent way to expand my social network.

Virtually Social
In theory, social networking revolves around the concept of Six Degrees of Separation. A friend knows a friend and so on to create your social circle. MySpace and Friendster both offer the abilty to restrict contact to anybody that isn’t related to your network, but you can shut it off and virtually travel the world.

Unlike online dating, social networking is something vastly more personal and everybody’s intentions are uniquely their own. Some are merely ‘collecting’ friends, while others are looking for casual relationships, friendships, or activity partners. Some just use the online world to virtually share their entire life.

MySpace offers remarkable customization capabilities including backgrounds, photographs, embedded video, and audio to truly express yourself with 18 million users. Friendster isn’t as customizable and offers 16 million users, but everything is more consistent across profiles and isn’t as cluttered.

The Results

The bigger question is – Does social networking work? Social interaction, whether it’s real or virtual, is ultimately the goal. For me, Friendster yielded more results. I had double the hits to my profile in the last two months, made one friend I see regularly, one friend I see every now and again, and one person I’m hoping to see again. There were a few dining recommendations too.

With MySpace, I became part of a collection and that’s pretty much it. Evidently, some people collect Asian men and belong to discussion groups all about the topic. MySpace has groups called White Girls Who Love Asian Guys (and vice versa), Asian Caucasian Connection, Caucasian Asian Love, WhiteOnRice.com, and White Girls who love Asian Boys. Who knew?

My results might have been better on both sites if I made more of an effort. I chose not to reach out to new people unless something really intrigued me. It turns out only two really did. Generally, I watched from the sidelines instead. I’m still not completely comfortable putting my personal life out there in cyberspace.

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