I saw off of Todd Zeigler’s twitter that Hillary has started her very own social networking site!

Because MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and the other 91 socnets out there aren’t enough…

Now, the other top-tier Democratic presidentials are doing this – Obama’s got his own and Edward’s has OneCorps, but as my Mother always said…

I think this is one case where I don’t want Republican’s to imitate the Dem’s online practices.

I created an account with the campaign, and the largest group, with a whooping 23 members is LGBT COMMUNITY FOR HILLARY CLINTON. For those of you who didn’t go to a liberal college like myself LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual & Transgendered - what a mouthful.

I don’t think that the investment in time and energy to run these in-house platforms is well spent. At best you’ll get some people who’d never normally join Facebook or MySpace to create a profile on the Campaign’s socnet. But, I think the more likely situation is that the campaign is stealing its own lunch.

Most of the people who will make a profile will be the hardcore activists who already have a profile on Facebook. Furthermore, the work they’re doing to create content on the campaign’s own little internal socnet isn’t reaching anyone beyond the gated community. For a campaign, one of the primary purposes of a socnet is to have its modern media volunteers engaging with other people online and promoting the candidate.

These in-house socnets, like Clinton’s, suck energy, time and resources away from where activists should be focused: reaching out to undecided, or as yet unengaged voters, and instead channel the focus inward. In effect the campaign is connecting with itself.

A final note, related to socnets, but thankfully not to the Dems. Danah Boyd has a great blog essay, “viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” (hat tip again to Todd). What’s really interesting is how Danah looks at the growth of MySpace and Facebook, and how and why people decide to use one socnet over another. I’ll comment more on her piece later.