Ivan, It was the movement I said that was large and well funded, so I was not talking just about GInet.

I don’t think it has much to do with the size of your staff. Amnesty International seems to be all over on social networks, but all they do is use it as a PR newswire. Not for lack of trying on their part, I just think that social networks are used more for entertainment and socializing than for debate or action.

In my opinion there is a large demographic element to this problem. 95% of the networks users are a young generation who are socialized to communities, either on the web or the phone, in short, unsubstantial, but frequent messages. There was quite a large and robust discussion community back in the age of CompuServe (my time) but when AOL made that all too plastic those communities all migrated off into separate forums. So the audience that wants to have discussions that are more substantive than comments on blog posts are spread out and not highly engaged.

Im not sure what the answer is to be honest because if my theory is right then there may not really be a demand for general population discussion sites. That’s why I thought your proposal and my similar one at Netsquared made sense - because it might be better to concentrate discussions into topic specific locations than hope that these one size fits all sites will eventually change their personality. Then we would just use the large networks as marketing and PR sites.