A recent story in Fortune describes an interesting trend : The increasing popularity of social-networking websites.

…this summer (Joichi) Ito joined a website called Linkedin, one of about 15 so-called social-networking companies or sites formed in the past year. These businesses, all part of the hottest online trend, act as intricate friendship flow charts, showing who is friends or partners with whom. The best-known site, called Friendster, launched in May and is already hosting almost two million users, most of whom–unlike the businesspeople using Linkedin–are looking for dates, love, or sex.

In the free-ranging world of the Internet, the ties created by social-networking sites have people excited. Some are calling it a social revolution… Today’s social networks typically give you access to friends of friends out to four degrees of separation. Everybody you meet on such a site is thus connected to you by a traceable network of acquaintance.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of Six Degrees of Freedom, but it is always seen as a nice-to-know phenomenon, and not much more. As it turns out, people are now beginning to put such websites to interesting uses :

In San Francisco, where unemployment is rampant and social networking is nearly an obsession for just about everyone under 35, it seems everybody looking for a job is using sites like Friendster, Linkedin, Tribe.net, or Ryze… The phenomenon may be seen as offering people tools analogous to the most powerful ones being used in business… And if the best jobs come through connections, what better way to find work than through a giant online social network?

And it’s not just jobs, a freelancing friend tells me that he found a number of interesting people with his kind of interests in the one (Ryze) meeting he attended, and some prospective clients too! According to him, Ryze is one social network that is quite active in Bombay and has a number of members from India.

I figure, the way my networking skills are, it wouldn’t hurt to use some Technology to augment my network. So I’ll probably sign up on one of these sites before the day ends.

But what is most fascinating for me is the whole concept of taking the Internet to another level altogether. As the Fortune story says :

There may be a new kind of Internet emerging–one more about connecting people to people than people to websites.