Everyone is jumping on the social networking bandwagon, and Hugh Hefner never seems to miss a good party.

Playboy is getting into the social networking craze with PlayboyU.com, a new attempt to market to the student body in the language it is most comfortable with. It’s free to join, but enrollment is by invite only and limited to college students with .edu email address. Not unlike Facebook, it is all about letting your friends know how much of a party animal you are, allowing users to upload photos, videos and messages visible to only those within your group. Playboy says it will keep nudity off the site but not necessarily scantily clad women and will do its best to bar non-student campus personnel from joining. Social networking platform Ning, co-founded by Netscape’s Marc Andreessen, is powering PlayboyU.  (source: Cynopis).

I’m sure people will sign on just for the articles.

Are the targeted social networking sites going to work in the long-run? We have McCain Space, MyBarackObama, Nintendo Mii, LinkedIn, MySpace and now a proposed intelligence network. Are these going to survive?

Facebook works because you can draw from other networks. Instead of recreating the wheel, you can combine two, three or four other platforms. It’s far easier to draw from another pool of users than recruit your own. Unless it’s highly targeted and seperate like the intelligence world, it will be hard to maintain traffic. Once the social networking trend dies down and the next big thing comes along, will these sites stay active?