So you've been getting all these e-mail invitations from pals and colleagues and uncles, and you're wondering whether you should take out the time to click the link and fill in a boring form. Sometimes the person is a vague memory; sometimes, the site has a ridiculous name. So should you click those links and sign up? What's in it for you? Networking and interacting with people on the Internet is the way ahead: we're getting more and more virtual. It's now normal to consider virtual beings your friends and colleagues. Something your father just won't understand. Don't bother explaining. This is after all call ?Social Networking? - your gate way to the online world of intimacy.

The idea behind social networking, strictly speaking, is to grow your list of friends, but as all working professionals know, we have varied levels and types of friends. First come our buddies (our yaars), and these are people you just love to hang out with, share thoughts and ideas, and all this is generally casual and playful interaction. Most popular social networking sites involve making such friends.

Much to your pleasure, Hollywood stars, famous musicians and sports celebrities do their networking through online these days. It means, you can be a friend of Tom Cruz, Madonna or Bred Pit in no time; provided you guys are part on the same social networking platforms.

The big daddy in this genre, no other site has received as much publicity as MySpace has. It is like the Oracle of data storage, or the Cisco of network devices. It has both ardent fans as well as vitriolic critics. It was originally started by Tom Andersen and Chris DeWolfe in November 2003, though there is some dispute and acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in July 2005 for US $580 million.

As a social networking site MySpace is a one-stop entertainment shop. You can add pictures, write blogs, make friends, upload music and video, organize offline events with your online buddies and do gadzillions of other things (shave Britney and get a ringtone). But MySpace's USP is that unlike most other sites which deal in social networking, it offers you complete leeway to modify and customize your profile page. You get to decide which colours and fonts to keep, what apps to embed and what should be your profile's look and feel. These effects are achieved by copy pasting simple HTML and CSS code. The MySpace Profile Editor can be used to good effect.

Love it or hate it, you cannot escape MySpace. With MySpace being the fourth most popular site ever, with a user base touching about 200 million and available in languages like French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Chinese, the juggernaut rolls on.

Today, social networking accounts for the majority of surfing done globally. Sites such as MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Facebook, Friendster, Classmates, Bebo, and many, many more, all boast of millions of users. MySpace, in particular, boasts of almost a whopping 200 million registered users! Orkut is very popular amongst us Indians, while more Indian sites seem to be coming up by the month.

Social networking is very much like real life in the sense that you're still dealing with real people. All the etiquette you enforce upon yourself in real life when dealing with friends or colleagues should be put into use when networking online as well.

If you want to meet celebrities from the world of entertainment, being member and user of these networking groups will surely help you in fulfilling your desires.