When I arrived at work this morning, I had an email waiting for me from a woman who read my story today on social networking sites. She’s a Facebook and Myspace user, but the site she wanted to talk about was a young site, Ancestral Space, that targets folks interested in genealogy.

Funny thing about  the social networking sites. I have to confess that, before starting this particular beat, I didn’t spend too much time with them. Never really had a reason to. Or at least, that’s what I thought.

Earlier this year, I joined both Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Flickr as a way of educating myself for the job. Of the four, I find myself spending most of my time with Facebook and Flickr.

The reasons are pretty simple. In the case of Facebook, that’s where my friends gather. Flickr fits me because of my love of photography.

I’ve made shallow forays into LinkedIn and MySpace, but neither has proven to be a particularly good fit for me.

Outside of establishing that I am, indeed, linked to other people, I haven’t found much of a reason to spend time with LinkedIn. MySpace, on the other hand, has just been a sad experience. After some six months with my new MySpace page I still have only one friend. And that’s Tom, the guy everyone gets as a friend when they sign up.

It really illustrates, for me, the strength and weakness of social networking sites. They offer a great way to communicate with friends and keep up with people you might otherwise lose track of. But if your friends aren’t fans of a particular site, it can be awfully lonely there in that vast crowd of networking strangers.

Unless, that is, the site revolves around something you love. For me, that’s Flickr. I don’t really interact with many of my real friends there, but I enjoy posting photos and looking at other people’s work.