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I knew something significant was up when, a couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail notifying me that a long-ago boss had added me as a "friend" on Facebook. This was a genuine grownup with an important and time-consuming job (that is, not a magazine writer). And here he was, asking me to be his social-networking buddy.

A lot of the things that grownups already do on the Internet, from blogging to participating in PTA newsgroups to mass e-mailing bad jokes to friends and family, could be described as social networking. The term is applied mainly, though, to the services that enable users to collect and communicate with a network of "friends." Friendster was the first, in 2002. The rise of these outfits has been one of the great business and societal stories of recent years. Americans now spend more time on MySpace, which was founded in 2004 and has supplanted Friendster, than on any other domain, including Google.

Up to now, though, this has been a game for the kids. Yes, lots of politicians and musicians and other adults have MySpace pages. But MySpace sees its core market as people in their 20s. Hardly anybody of my acquaintance (I'm 43 and don't know a lot of politicians or musicians) hangs out there. I do know lots of people on LinkedIn, a business-networking site. But LinkedIn is about finding jobs and making deals and getting answers to business questions. It's not a place to while away your days.

Which brings us to Facebook. Founded at Harvard early in 2004 by sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and transplanted to California that summer, it swept the nation's campuses with its unique mix of exclusivity (you couldn't sign up without a college e-mail address) and postadolescent rambunctiousness. Facebook began admitting high schoolers in 2005, started hooking up workplace networks (first at companies that employ lots of recent grads) in April 2006 and opened to all in September.

Now Facebook claims to be signing up 150,000 new members a day. MySpace says it's adding 250,000 members daily, but those don't all represent actual people (MySpace places no restrictions on how many identities one can assume), and there's a widespread belief--albeit one not yet backed up by much hard data--that Facebook is gaining ground. It's a belief shared by Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns MySpace. When an interviewer quipped in June that readers were abandoning newspapers for MySpace, Murdoch shot back, "I wish they were. They're all going to Facebook at the moment."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1640380,00.html#ixzz0WAE2GlNz