Online social networks build online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. This is a very powerful tool.

Social networking has created powerful new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people, and it now seems that social networking will be an enduring part of everyday life. Imaging Foundation uses the power of these communities to communicate important information and messages about our ocean ecosystems.

MySpace - MySpace is a popular social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. The 100 millionth account was created on August 6, 2006, the site attracts 230,000 new users per day

MySpace: www.myspace.com/imagingfoundation

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg while he was still a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Ivy League. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 100 million active users worldwide.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Imaging-Foundation-Sea-Save/61180603506?ref=ts

YouTube - YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day, and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos were being added per day in May 2006, and this increased to 65,000 by July. In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users had made over 3 billion video views. In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos (requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had about 500,000 user accounts. As of April 9, 2008, a YouTube search returns about 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels. It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000, and that around 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute. In March 2008, its bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately $1 million a day.

YouTube: www.youtube.com/imagingfoundation

Blogger.com is a service that permits, easy, attractive and immediate blog feeds to a variety of Internet sites. This tool makes expedition journal communication accessible and inexpensive.

Blogger: www.itsyourocean.blogspot.com

Hi5.com is the #1 social network in over 25 nations across Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Hi5 claims to be the #1 social network for the world's Spanish language population, and the service is available in a total of 23 languages as of April 2008. IF uses this network to reach audiences in Latin America.