I did a presentation on social networking last night for RRLC. We had some good conversation, which made this particular class a lot of fun.

Last week as I was preparing for the class I was poking around on the internet, bookmarking useful sites that I wanted to be sure to point out. My usual mode of doing this sort of thing consists of me sitting on the couch with my laptop while watching tv. (I’m a two-screen person, almost always.)

I was listening to one of the news channels — I don’t recall if it was local or national news — and heard them talking about a new social networking site. As it turns out, this new site was created by a young man (he looked to be college-age) who decided to build something similar to myspace, but which would be easy for people his parents’ age to use. What he came up with is MyTimeHero.com. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a quick look. All the buttons have mouseover definitions so that you know exactly what that button leads to. The site has a clean look that won’t drive you crazy the way MySpace will, with it’s “too easy to be ultra-creative” benefits. (Kids love to put purple text on black backgrounds, barely-readable text on way-too-busy backgrounds, and animations everywhere.) Your profile can be either public or private. You can find other people with similar interests. (Reading brought up a lot of people. Caving brought up zero. Must be an age thing.)

It’ll be interesting to see if this site catches on with the “mature” generation the way MySpace did with the kids.