Sonia Arrison writes in a piece called Is Friendster the New TIA? an interesting take on social networking: are we voluntarily offering up information on our interests, activities, and predilections that could allow the unscrupulous and/or security agencies to discern our every move?

"The idea of centralizing data to find patterns and links among people is no longer limited to governments or corporations. Individuals are now getting into the game with "social networking" web sites, the hottest thing in Silicon Valley.

Friendster, Ryze, Linked-in, Tribe.Net, Yafro, Plaxo, and Spoke are a networker's dream but a privacy-hawk's nightmare. These sites are aggregating information, provided by people themselves, that could prove almost as useful as a Total Information Awareness (TIA) program to government snoops."

She poses some interesting scenarios: FBI agents create false identities on Friendster ("Fraudsters") who gather data on the unsuspecting, either manually or through the use of Carnivore-like software programs.

I think it is just as likely -- along the same line of argument -- that the networks will become the scene where viral marketing groups of the big ad agencies try to push new trends and memes to the hip, connected, early adopters that are flocking there. Just as insidious, in a way.