YUWIE - Building A Community

There will be an interesting discussion to be had around social networking sites, and the role they play in building ties between progressive actors.

The YUWIE site, as well as the other social networking sites, promises to build bridges between individuals and organisations working in the broad field of development by providing news, forums, blogs, photos and more to members. How do sites like YUWIE build community?

Some thoughts:

Are stronger social ties what's really missing? And to what extent can those be built at YUWIE? What kinds of information actually build ties? Is it photos? Knowing where someone went to school? Is it a random hodgepodge, within which we might connect to certain random bits (oh, I went to Texas too!)

Or is the biggest need for a constructive space to bat around ideas and discussions? What should that space look like to be most effective?

And at what point do we hit social networking site overload? Can we effectively operate on multiple social networking sites simultaneously - YUWIE and Myspace and Facebook?