I tried a lot of the social networks early on. But the last one I dove into was Orkut (over three years ago) and I quickly jumped out after a few weeks when I saw that I had 26000 new contacts.

I have passed up many invitations to LinkedIn for the same reason. I've never joined Facebook or myspace.

Even without these networks, I have more than enough people to keep up with and stepped way back on my blog reading about a year ago when I realized I was losing touch with my personal friends because of my many new virtual friends.

However, there is a new social networking tool that was actually created right here in Burlington Vermont, that I joined over two months ago and I just love it! It's called FrontPorchForum. I've referred to it as Facebook for grownups. But it's really not anything like that.

What FrontPorchForum focuses on is your very local community. It creates an online forum, also distributed every few days in an email, that allows you to connect to your neighbors. So the people in my town of Huntington are the only people who's posts I read and who see my posts (and my email address).

It is an amazing way of connecting with your community and helping each other out. I've seen neighbors find (and get rid of) used stoves and offer to visit another neighbor to give woodstacking tips. I was able to find out how Sprint cell service works right in my neighborhood by asking on the forum. People are sharing community news, finding a taker for a last minute extra ticket to see an Emmy Lou Harris concert, finding house sitters, local plumbers and discovering what's fresh at the local farmstand.

I also feel that I've suddenly become so much more connected to this community that I moved into almost 4 years ago. I know who lives in those houses, the name of the local blacksmith and that there are so many really interesting people living a stone's throw away. I did keep silent when a rash of Mac users got excited about starting a local Mac user group.

It is an interesting phenomenon to me because in the past six or seven years, the internet and blogging has made me part of a worldwide community of software developers. I have made so many new friends in the .NET world. Conferences turned into a big party because you suddenly knew so many of those faces, rather than just being one in a sea. And of course, having people come up and say "hi" because they know me (and my face - or more likely my hair) from my blogs has been a lot of fun.

But FrontPorchForum has come full circle because it has used this same technology to bring me back into my own local community which, although initial connections are through the web, enables me to walk out my door and down my road and meet up with many new friends and neighbors.

FPF is still fairly new and local. The founder, Michael Wood-Lewis, started it in Burlington and has added communities bit by bit around the Burlington area.

I've already talked to him about what he's going to do when it goes nationwide or even worldwide; what technologies he's vested in currently and what is on his mind for scaling out. Because as far as I'm concerned, that is inevitable!