The current state of affairs where people young and old (primarily young) are posting intimate details about their lives on the Internet has gradually been careening towards a collision with professionalism and morality for a great number of individuals. For one such forum of semi-private status known as Late Night Shots, these online displays of personal thought and action may have hit the point where people were hoping it wouldn’t reach. On Thursday July 13th, a free local newspaper called the Washington City Paper released a front-page article entitled “Members Only” attempting to expose as much filth as possible about the musings of the Late Night Shots social networking site, but in as personal a way as possible. Names were named, racial and sexual improprieties were attributed, and inflated senses of self-worth were explored as the anonymity of the Internet was unraveled before the fishbowl that is Washington, DC. Regardless of the respectability of this piece of journalism or its publishers, this has no doubt raised some eyebrows and caught peoples' attention as judging from the 481 comments the article has elicited for the City Paper’s website as of COB July 18:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=2008&comments=show

So after the dust settles the reputations may remain tarnished, and jobs present and future still lost for a select few, but there’s still the question of whether this will mean anything for social networking sites in general as they lead the way in this current Web 2.0 revolution? Will people stop using such websites as potentially more and more bombs are dropped to expose peoples’ weekend habits and overly sensitive viewpoints? Currently, websites like Late Night Shots (although I had heard this was not among them) are attracting wads of capital from outside investors and will be expected to deliver profits based purely on content generated by its users, a la Facebook and MySpace. That will quickly become a hard feat to accomplish if those users are driven away by any risk to their security. It seems the likelihood of public outings are only more and more likely as these social networking sites spring up left and right. In fact, this free software used to run this blog is even serviceable as a social networking arena with only a moderate knowledge of programming to customize it:

http://groups.drupal.org/social-networking-sites

Is it possible that it will only take one group or one large documented misstep to cause a reaction of others to stop using all these new social outlets?