Don't understand all the fuss over social networking online? Maybe you should sign-up with the likes of Snubster, Enemybook, and Hatebook.

Mushrooming over the Web for the past 18 months or so, these sites seem to be born out of the desire to cock a snook at all the phony aspects of online social networking and social networking Web sites -- a la Facebook, MySpace, and so on.

Whether it's Enemybook or Hatebook or Snubster, the agenda is the same -- to parody and poke fun, even 'enemy' so-called friends and connections -- acquired of course through social networking online.

Bryant Choung (26), technology consultant and founder of Snubster, says he didn't understand the kind of fake-friend war chests people were so busy building online. He would get Facebook requests from people he'd spoken to for a couple of minutes at a bar or a party, who'd then want to go online and peruse all of his photos and contacts. He just didn't get it.

Kevin Matulef (28), founder of Enemybook, says it started with a popular joke at Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT) asking whether someone was a real- or a Facebook- friend. Though Enemybook now is a full-fledged site that lets people express themselves through their dislikes.

One thing that Choung and Matulef are agreed upon is that most people do-, rather should- take these sites as a joke, and not too seriously.

Murray Pomerance, Professor of Pop Culture Sociology at the Ryerson University in Toronto, begs to differ. He says most people take their online relationships very seriously, and a majority end up revealing things about themselves on these sites that they would never ever do face-to-face.

In the olden days, it wasn't done to display emotion, and now, there are Web sites where people can register what they're feeling, so that it's up there for everyone to see. Pomerance views the whole thing -- whether making friends or enemies -- as dangerous, to say the least.

Meanwhile, looking at the kind of membership these sites boast; we have a Facebook with 59 million active users worldwide, Snubster with 16,000 users worldwide, and Enemybook with 9,000 users the world over.

More:
Facebook Drops "is" from Updates