Social networking by its nature has relied on the breadth of 'connections' in order to succeed - the larger the numbers of people on a particular site, the more effective it become at forging the unique and valuable social connections that people look for from social networking sites.

We've recently be working with some companies developing 'fenced' social networking sites which deliver the functionalities of Facebook, MySpace, etc, but offer market specific functionality for a market segment. For example, for Slough Young People's Centre (www.sypc.co.uk), we've developed 80% of the functionality of Facebook, but then added personal podcasts, automated CV generation with 'virtual assistance' and shared social calendars. The application has been so successful that we launched the application as a stand alone component earlier this week (http://www.iYoof.co.uk).


The benefits of 'targetted' functionality are obvious for users but the lack of 'open associations' can be viewed either as a positive or a negative depending on where you are standing. For our youth orients social networking sites, security has such an overriding imporance, that 'fenced' membership helps to make site management feasible.