Ever since the concept of the ’social network’ website was coined in the early 2000’s, it’s been abused as much as it’s been used. Properly understood, a social network is a website whose primary purpose is to enable people to build connections and communicate with each other through those connections. Though Facebook is now considered the sine qua non of the medium, it began with Friendster and encompasses MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn as well as smaller, specialist sites like the British, gay-focussed Thingbox.

But because social networks evolved around the same time as other Web 2.0 services, it’s often used as a catch-all term. Twitter, LiveJournal, Flickr and YouTube have all been called ’social networks’ in the press. In fact, though, these are more publishing services. Their main purpose isn’t to enable people to communicate with friends or colleagues but to share items with the entire internet. All these services offer the option of publishing tweets, blogs, photos or videos to just a select group, but the default option - and the culture of these sites’ communities - is publishing to the entire web. This type of site began with blogs services, which offer conversation through comments, and rudimentary communities through ‘blogrolls’, but are essentially a publishing mechanism.

Recently, though, the line between the two models has begun to blur. Facebook, which has grown into the world’s largest social network by focussing on helping people share items with friends, has recently begun encouraging users to make more of their shared items visible to the entire internet. Twitter, developed as a micro-blogging system, has increasingly become a medium for conversation thanks to the invention (by users) of ‘@mentions’. And services like Google Friend Connect and the Meebo toolbar are linking the users of websites together and enabling them to talk to each other. Facebook’s ambitious Connect programme is designed to turn the whole web into an extension of its platform, with everyone signing into blogs and sharing services with their Facebook account and being immediately able to see which of their friends also use the site.

Now the blog network Gawker Media has taken things a step further. Its sites - and particularly Gawker, the infamous New York media and gossip blog - have long been known for their incisive (read:bitchy) comments. Now, the site has given its commenters the run of the place. Under their new initiative, Gawker Open Forums, the blog’s tag pages have become wide-open spaces where comments by users share equal billing with the blog’s actual posts. The staff can easily ‘promote’ user posts to the blog’s front page, and a ‘firehose’ view showing every user and staff post all on one page is in the making.

That might sound like a recipe for chaos. But crucially, Gawker also tightly restricts who actually gets to be a commenter on its websites. Only a tiny handful of users - ’starred commenters’ - can place a comment on a post or tag page and actually have it visible on the page by default. The jottings of a wider group - ‘approved commenters’ - are visible behind a ’show more’ link. And those of new commenters aren’t visible at all, unless ‘promoted’ by a staff member or starred commenter. Gawker founder Nick Denton likens the site to a club, with ‘approved commenters’ those allowed to get in, and ’starred commenters’ those allowed into the VIP room.

In practice, each Gawker blog is fast becoming a high-visibility social network, with a select group of users - selected by the community according to their ability to say interesting things about the blog’s topic - sharing words and links between each other.

For some reason, my Wordpress installation is preventing me publishing posts above a certain length. Read part 2.