Social Networking Overload

I will admit, I am a huge fan of the social networking concept.  I like the fact you can expand a personal network beyond voice, email and instant messaging.  You can even expand your network with folks all over the world that you have never met.  It really creates a new way to interact with others.   Now I know newsgroups and forums have been around for sometime now and probably provide to some degree similar networking.   I always viewed these sites as "dump and run" for information.  As I subscribe to most of these social sites, I find myself wondering which ones do I really want to use as my primary address.  I belong to a few of the popular ones.  I'd say out of all the ones I have tried, I find Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook as the ones I primarily use.  Facebook has grown on me partly because a lot of my friends and colleagues are on there.  Facebook appears to have reached out to people that I would not find otherwise.  As with MySpace, Facebook is probably the most advertised to the general public.  Facebook is a great way to reunite with people I have not spoken to in over 20 years.  Crazy how that works.  Now Linkedin is a pretty cool idea.  Its amazing how many people I can possibly know.  It really puts your rolodex in perspective.  Linkedin is a great source for professional contacts.  The way they integrate job searching is pretty slick.  You can search on potential job opportunities and it will tell you how you might be connected to that company.  I just started using Twitter.  My initial impressions of it is that its a clean way to "publicly"  broadcast messages to larger groups of people.  I like the randomness of what messages come across.  My appetite for new information has been crazy in the last 2 years.  So sites like Twitter typically keep me grounded.  I personally use a application called Twitterrific on my Mac.  Highly recommended. So having used all these cool social networking sites, I can only sense that this is a growing concept and has become a little too crowded.  Now like anything else, things will calm down and only a few will prevail.  For now I am getting my information fix through all these channels.  As time goes on, new ideas will come out and I will hopefully be wasting my time in those ways. ~Cheers