I got an invitation to yet another social networking site, Dopplr.   This one is focused around travel.  You enter your trips and you can see if any of your friends are going to be there.  So, for example, I can tell that Nat Torkington and Tim O'Reilly are going to be in Portland in July at the same time I will be there for OSCON.  That one probably isn't a great surprise as I would have expected to see them both at OSCON!  However, for other shows, it will be fun to see in advance who will be there without having to send out a mass mailing.

I say "yet another social networking site" but really I think social networking sites are exciting – they are on to something.   Fifty years from now I don't think we'll all be members of LinkedIn, FaceBook and Twitter, but I do think that we will have extremely sophisticated but transparent ways of connecting not only to our friends online but to those that share similar interests.

I currently use and enjoy:

• LinkedIn – great for business networking!
• Flickr – awesome pictures and a good way to see what is going on in your friends' lives.

I tried and didn't like or didn't find useful:

• Friendster – I never got anything out of this.  Maybe my network was too small. Maybe they just didn't make it clear what I was supposed to be there for.
• FaceBook – I don't have enough friends using this for this to be useful for me.  The average user's age appears to be 15 years younger than me so that might explain why I haven't found my friends there.  I did join a group of people named Stormy!
• Orkut – This is one of the first ones I joined and it was really fun for a while seeing who knew who and keeping track of how many friends you had but it never turned into anything useful and it now seems to predominately Brazilian.
• Mult-something or another

I haven't tried these because I'm afraid to!

• Twitter – hear what all your friends are doing minute by minute?  Yikes!  When would you find time to enter what you were doing much less listen to everyone else?
• MySpace – the hype scared me away!

I think the most successful social networking sites will be those that have a defined purpose like business networking, pictures, or travel.

So if you are on Dopplr, let me know!