Social Networks and Privacy

There's a lot of talk happening right now about social networks, especially Facebook. I agree with the Man in Blue that it is not the site but each one of us are owners of social networks. When I take stock of what I have, this is what I realized:

• My Yahoo Groups allows me to keep my readers informed on what's new in my site.
• Twitter gets me posted on what friends and idols in the blogging community are doing now.
  
• MyBlogLog lets me know what my contacts are reading as it appears on "what's hot in my communities" and what else are they reading through its blog stats.
  
• LinkedIn establishes a permanent connection with the people I've met in various events I participated in, club members, and those who joined my Yahoo Groups.
• I monitor what my relatives and friends are up to through Friendster.

If there's one thing I enjoy about social networks is that it allows you to catch up with people whom you haven't seen for a long time, like what happened to Joh recently. In Facebook, I was surprised to see again one of my students in the APEC E-Biz Training for Women SMEs two years ago, Sarah Benjamin, site owner of Simply Rose Petals.

So I guess the idea of having an ultimate social network where all of these are in may be nice but I'm a little against it as well. For one, I support the idea of segmentation. There are just some stuff that you can't mix and best that they are separated. An entity having full vision of your Internet life may not be so great. We have to remind our kids also from pouring their heart out online or even inventing stories online using these sites as that may get them into trouble later on.