It all started with websites such as friendsreunited.com and other similar ones. But the digital profile world is exploding in Malta with the setup of myspace.com and hi5.com.

To put you in the picture, very simply, you surf onto these websites and are invited to create you own homepage.

Let us take myspace for starters. The basics of myspace let you create a homepage where you tell people about yourself and can also upload pictures, music and other interests you have.

I will give my own testimony. I was urged to join myspace by some friends and I did so, just for kicks. Within minutes, I began receiving messages from all over the world from people that I had met in the past. Guys I was at school within England began to contact me and we even tracked down various old school friends who had moved abroad. But it does not end there.

One of the best features of myspace is the friends network, whereby people who know each other can also simply click on the profiles of mutual friends. It is not only limited to people that you know personally either. People can simply contact you and speak to you. Some instances I have come across include Italian people asking for advice on journalism (which is of course mentioned in my profile). There are also hundreds of ‘groups’ one can join, ranging from photography, Malta, automotive enthusiasts, football enthusiasts and much, much more. News can be accessed, videos can be watched and there are many forum threads and chat rooms.

To put it in a nutshell, the world is at your fingertips. Some people use the site for dating, but more often than not, people use it as a way to express themselves at leisure in today’s fast-paced world. I use it as a showcase for my amateur photography, as do many others. Some just use it as a way to express themselves. At the time of penning this article, there were a total of 176,541,433 users who had profiles.

If one browses through and runs a Malta search, 1,938 people show up. One must remember though that these range from charities, individuals, fan sites and all sorts of others. There are groups dedicated to Malta, Maltese Australians, UK-Maltese – all sorts at your fingertips.

Now if that sounds impressive – we must look at hi5.com. There are a total of 36,000 members from Malta online and it increases every day. Hi5 is a lot more basic than myspace, but it certainly seems to be an effective way for people to keep in touch and to find old friends. It’s a whole new world out there and it just keeps growing every day. Don’t just take my word for it. Check them out...