Editor-in-chief of Wired magazine on integrating onto the social networks

As Chris Anderson writes in his blog devoted to The Long Tale effect (and to the book promoted thereby :-) )

Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there's a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy--social networking as a feature, not a destination.
At the moment, my sites range from virtually no social networking (BookTour and this site) to heavy social networking (DIYDrones, which is built from the ground up on the Ning platform). Wired is on the minimal social networking side, with only our Reddit news submission and voting service doing much of it at all.

(BTW, by "social networking" I'm not including basic "chat amongst yourself" stuff like comments, wikis and voting. Instead, social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful).

In the case of Wired, social networking is clearly a feature that we should have more of. But we shouldn't move the brand onto a MySpace page or a Facebook app simply to gain access to the tools that could connect our readers to each other (which is not to say that we couldn't image a Wired Facebook app of some sort; we just haven't released one yet). Instead, it's mostly something we should build or buy and integrate into wired.com wherever it makes sense.