I've played around with a few social networking sites. My current preference is for Multiply. I wanted something that allowed me to restrict access to certain content and it had to be easy to use so that my non-technical contacts could use it. I have various friends and family on there, but they don't make much use of it. It's a shame as there is great potential for sharing photos and news with people you don't see all the time. At least they get to see my pictures and other stuff. I've started a couple of groups there for various purposes, but again the other members do not contribute much. Maybe they are scared to. Personally I love the fact that I can share my thoughts with the world, but I realise that for others this is a leap into the unknown.

I also looked at Orkut. That's part of the Google empire so I didn't even need to register separately, but I was underwhelmed. It didn't seem to offer much. I've not even bothered with things like Myspace as that seems to be more about getting as many contacts as possible, regardless of whether you know them.

My latest candidate is Mugshot. This is a different animal in that it acts more as an aggregator, but can host groups and comments. You can use it to combine updates from a variety of social sites such as del.icio.us and Last.fm. I was attracted to it as it is produced by long-time Linux people Red Hat. It's all open source, so it should be possible for users to improve it. I've not worked out what skills are required for that yet.

Of course, to test out a social network you need some contacts. So does anyone fancy a play?

I managed to accidentally hack the site when I first tried it. To register you have to let them send you an email with a sign-up link. Trouble was that my link took me to someone else's profile where I could see their private details. In this case all I could see was their email address. I reported it to their support. It seems that they were caching the information and that, on rare occaisions, you would see the old data. They reckoned that once you had activated the account then this could no longer happen, but they have made changes to avoid it in future.