from article in local paper about new local social networking site

I say this is lot more complicated in practice. The trouble with new social-media (like facebook, myspace, even twitter etc) is that they make each and every person sitting in an island of their own, trying to fish people outside of their circle. This model does not provide mechanism to "facilitate" the expanding of circle (sort of like republicans idea of individuality versus liberal's 'it takes a village').

The old social-media like yahoogroup, usenet listservs and even the bbforums etc were totally different; they had mechanism to facilitate the expanding of online friendship (they still do). But they seems to be in the background these days due to all the hype behind facebook crowd.