It strikes me that maybe the reason why a commonly accepted verb has not emerged is because there is not a commonly accepted understanding of what the action (as represented by the verb) actually consists of. Thus: if I 'Facebook' someone, I am checking him/her out to find out more about them/how they represent themselves - this is understood as a form of social vetting. But if I set up a facebook (or MySpace or whatever), different people do it for different reasons, which probably operate simultaneously. Just a thought - not sure if it pans out. ++++++++++ Blog: www.julianhopkins.net Skype: julhop IM: jfprhopkins@hotmail.com ------------------------------ Message: 9 Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 09:15:49 +0200 From: <richard.ling@telenor.com> Subject: Re: [Air-l] A verb for using social networking sites To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Message-ID: <04161341FDE60141B7640D4E801D11EC028E292F@TNS-FBU-2E-011.corp.telenor.no> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hello all, This is interesting. The use of these social networking sites has been around for a couple of years now and actually they have become quite popular. However, this has not resulted in a verb describing their use. It is possible to speculate that since all the different variations are commercial products that have slightly different characteristics that this has somehow hindered the development of a collective verb describing the activity. If that were then case, for example, IM would have suffered the same fate. In the case of IM there were a lot of mutually exclusive sites/companies offering their services and each had a somewhat different offering. Nonetheless, it resulted in the verbs of either IMing or chatting. Blogging followed suit with IM. As several have suggested, the "oh so cool" verb might derived from a portion of the name, such as facing or spacing, but that would only refer to one site. Another more clumsy alternative might be communitying or social networking, but neither of these has the verve to be widely used. I just think it is odd that these sites are quite successful and widespread, but that there hasn't been the step of developing a verb to describe their use. Rich L.