With phenomenal success of facebook, myspace, linkedin and many more popular social networks, the subject of 'whether social networks are good or bad' is being discussed every where.

Lets watch this simple youtube video to understand the how powerful a social network can be



Social networks are not for spending your time on internet, they are suppose to help you anything you need, it could be Job, skill, eductaion, dating or marketplace. Meetmylastname.com vision is to connect people with same last name and form a network so that it could be used to help each other.

Two negative effects that are widely discussed about social networking are privacy & lack of personal interaction. I don't necessarily agree with either of them, most of the social networks are based on UGC (user generated content), as a member you decide what to publish and what not to publish. Meetmylastname.com completely respects its member's privacy, we collects your e-mail id, user id, rest of the details are optional and you can choose your profile to be 'private'.

Now lets talk about lack of personal interaction due to online social networking, this is more of ill effect of web/internet rather than social networking. Infact social networks helps to improve personal interaction. One of my friend recently got promoted and relocated to a different place, I saw his profile update in LinkedIn and I called him to congratulate, he was so thrilled that I called him even before he called me.

Many enterprises are too seriously considering providing social networking utilities for their employees as they don't want to separate private lifes with work. However some enterprises are going extreme and blocking access to social networking sites. I read in an article recently about a company banning 'facebbok' access to its employees at work. Somebody asked his CIO how their employees are reacting, his simply said 'they are accessing 'myspace' now' :-)

Click here to read Gartner analyst's views