Social Networks - The not so New Band Wagon

Social Networks have been the buzz for most of the past decade, the use of user created content and connecting people. Creating networks of information that can be analysed for mountains of social data worth money to teh right people when used and applied in the right way.

Ask Face book what the average 30 something is interested in, by geographic location and the percentage chance they are at home in a specific postal area?

Ask the same question of Myspace, LinkedIn, Beebo, and Blogspot, Flickr the list goes on. Between them you'll more than likely in a metropolitan area be able to deduct actual percentage of people at home logged in their interests.

The power of these applications is in the spread of influence and advertising power, the ability of word of mouth one person walls a link to your site and approx 100 others see that link, gratis and chances are they share an interest as they are friends on a list.

This article was brought on by something I found today http://www.v2v.net/ or Starbucks v2v
Apparently a new form of social network. I am intrigued to the direction it will take, and how a large company such as starbucks would choose to use its own social network over making use of Facebook.

The site is presented as doing good, social volunteering, event organising, yet I feel it is just a way to gain all the data Starbucks want to market and query the data the exposure of facebook but with them in charge of the data. Possibly cutting into facebook with social tagging ap integration. Any way I've signe dup just to see were it goes..