Online Social Networking Frenzy Points To Internet's Future

Online social networking websites saw their ranks swell and values soar this year as everyone from moody teenagers and mellow music lovers to mate-seeking seniors joined online communities.

Google's freshly released "Zeitgeist 2007" reveals that seven out of the 10 hottest topics which triggered Internet queries during the year involved social networking.

A Top Ten list compiled by the world's most-used search engine includes British website Badoo, Spanish-language Hi5, and US-based Facebook.

Video-sharing websites YouTube and Dailymotion are on the list, along with the Club Penguin online role playing game where children pretending to be the flightless birds "waddle about and play" together.

Virtual world Second Life, where people represented by animated proxies interact in digitized fantasy settings, is the final social networking property in the Zeitgeist Top Ten.

The world has only seen "the tip of the iceberg" when it comes to online social networking, says MySpace vice president of business development Amit Kapur.

"It is a natural step in the evolution of the Web," Kapur told reporters. "The Web is getting more personal. I think you are going to see much more of that happen on every website across the Web."

MySpace aspires to become people's homes on the Internet, with profile pages serving as online addresses as well as springboards to online music, video, news and other content conducive to their tastes and interests.

"It is a next-generation portal," Kapur said. Industry statistics show Facebook membership more than doubled in the past year to about 55 million, while reigning champion MySpace grew 30 percent to top 110 million.

One in every four US residents uses MySpace, while in Britain it is as common to have a profile page on the website as it is to own a dog.

"We are very social animals and this allows us to ramp it up to a whole other order of magnitude," says professor Jeremy Bailenson, who heads a Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University in Northern California.

A strong appeal of online role-playing games and virtual worlds is that they free people to "interact as their ideal self and not their real self," according to Bailenson.

"You can be whatever age you want -- 20 forever -- dress any way you want, be any gender you want, and be socializing with zillions of people at once all the time," Bailenson told reporters.

His lab has created 3-dimensional digitized models customized with people's facial expressions and mannerisms.

"You can make a digital version of you that is animated so your grandkids' grandkids could put on a helmet and you can read them a story from the grave," Bailenson said, adding virtual communities offer a sense of immortality.