[Air-l] A verb for using social networking sites

[richard.ling at telenor.com]

Hello all,

This is interesting.  The use of these social networking sites has been
around for a couple of years now and actually they have become quite
popular.  However, this has not resulted in a verb describing their use.

It is possible to speculate that since all the different variations are
commercial products that have slightly different characteristics that
this has somehow hindered the development of a collective verb
describing the activity.

If that were then case, for example, IM would have suffered the same
fate.  In the case of IM there were a lot of mutually exclusive
sites/companies offering their services and each had a somewhat
different offering.  Nonetheless, it resulted in the verbs of either
IMing or chatting. Blogging followed suit with IM.  

As several have suggested, the "oh so cool" verb might derived from a
portion of the name, such as facing or spacing, but that would only
refer to one site.  

Another more clumsy alternative might be communitying or social
networking, but neither of these has the verve to be widely used.

I just think it is odd that these sites are quite successful and
widespread, but that there hasn't been the step of developing a verb to
describe their use.

Rich L.