MySpace may be the space of the moment, receiving praise, aplomb and (most importantly) generating traffic to Google in ever-greater numbers, but it's not even the middle of the social network craze. Really, the whole social network effect, as a theory and a technological practicality, started with the personal web sites of the early nineties. Personal web sites beget blogs beget networking sites like Orkut and LinkedIn beget MySpace, AIM Pages, YouTube, and whatever's to come next.

Thanks to a effort by white shoe management consultancy McKinsey to get the great minds of YouTube, Yahoo! and the like together with the old garde of the gigantic media (and I'm asking myself, and Aaron Cohen of Bolt Media, who was interviewed as a person of knowledge for the Financial Times piece: whither side of the old/new divide does Time Warner fall?), social networking is now coming into the good graces of the giants of Wall Street and Hollywood and Madison Avenue and all those places where fashion and money meet the people.

Robert Young, writing for GigaOm, calls MySpace the "it girl," and describes the infatuation with "her" and her groupies this way: "nearly every media company and venture capital fund on the planet is out on the dance floor stumbling over one another to see if they can identify the next breathless social networking beauty."

Speculation and quite cheeky to hear it here, but is AOL coming out with a MySpace competitor?  I'd defer this to rumors and possible fabrications, but when Business 2.0 and Fortune are covering it, I gotta wonder.

AOL of course was one of the original pioneers of the social networking space, with the original American Online service, and revolutionized messaging with AIM.  Since then MSN has come on the scene, as well as Yahoo! Messenger, and a host of other alternatives.  Of course for MSN and Yahoo!, social networking isn't so much the focus as are content and search.

It could be time, though, for AOL to take another run at center stage!