I'm scheduled to speak in Norfolk, Virginia tomorrow at the Eastern Association of Colleges and Employers (EACE) annual conference. My presentation is entitled, "Facebook, MySpace, and Other Social Networking Sites: Friend or Foe to Students and Employers?"

Sites such as Facebook and MySpace and other social networking sites are web-based software programs that enable people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form on-line communities. They're incredibly popular and powerful. MySpace has seen a 4,300% increase in traffic in two years and by some measures is now the most visited web site. It has "only" an 80 percent share of the social networking traffic. In second place is Facebook with eight percent, then Xanga with four percent, then Yahoo! 360 degrees with one percent. Does anything with under one percent of the market share of its niche ever matter? I thought not. So let's end that list there.

One of the items that I found interesting in preparing this presentation was the origins of social networking sites. I believe that they're a natural outgrowth of reality television. So what are the origins of reality television? Well, radio. Candid Microphone is credited as the first reality show. It aired on radio starting in 1947 and spun off Candid Camera in 1948. Fast forward to 1989 with COPS, then The Jerry Springer Show in 1991.

But the reality TV show that really put the genre on the map and set the stage for social networking sites was MTV’s The Real World, which launched in 1992. Why? Because for the first time regular people were put onto camera and encouraged to act outrageously while pretending to act normally.

Agree?