Social Networking, bookmarking, and start pages.

Social networking is a simply what it says, networking, sharing and exchanging information, socially, with people. Facebook and Myspace (twitter is growing in popularity) are the most popular social networking sites for peoples personal network of friends, family and old classmates. These sites allow people to keep in touch with many people that they would otherwise loose touch with. Linkedin is for professional use it allows you to network the job market and get in touch with people who can help you get jobs or hire for jobs. Accessing these sites is as simple as having an email address and filling out a few boxes.
Social bookmarking fills a few roles first it keeps your bookmarks so you can find and easily access all of your favorite websites. Social bookmarking and tags also allow you to easily organize all of you bookmarks, which is handy. Finally the social aspect of these sites like diigo is the most interesting piece you can actually see other peoples bookmarks see the sites that other deem useful enough to tag. Those others can be peers, celebrities or even experts in whatever field you happen to be researching. Again signing up for this is as easy as having an email address and filling out a form, although there is a download and browser plugin you will have to install to use these.
Start pages like netvibes are very cool, completely customizable homepages that contain what you want them too and only what you want them too. With applications called widgets you can have access to your email, jokes, sports scores, the weather, stock updates whatever your heart desires and nothing is dictated to you as have to haves. Once again if you have an email address you can quickly have a start page of you very own.