Social networks keep morphing

Nobody knows better than parents that the only constant is change. That goes for social networking as well as kids, the people who are evolving it and the Web more than any other group of people. The blog of ZDNET’s Dan Farber points to some new sites and developments in this youth-driven space. “In the last few days, I have heard about KickApps, a 'white box' social networking platform; iBloks, a 3-D environment for sharing and playing with rich media and games; MOG, a music-based social network; Markaboo, a new social bookmarking service; Boompa, MySpace for car enthusiasts, as the TechCrunch blog reports; NooZ, a news aggregation service with social features (voting, commenting, sharing, etc.) for the MySpace crowd; and Q121.com, a new social networking site for cell phones.”

Marketers are certainly seeing the power shift, so don’t parents need to consider the implications: “There is a massive shift to empowered people expressing their individuality - a trend of ‘mass individualism’,” writes digital marketing consultant Bob Schwartz in Manhattan Beach, Calif. And Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Buzzmetrics in Cincinnati writes at ClickZ.com that, “as a parent with a blog dedicated to my kids, you can bet our huge stash of diapers I'm asking hard questions about how much information we make public on the Web…. Thanks to the MySpace wake-up call, parents and just about everyone else are learning a lot more about how the Web really works.”