MC Hammer has a social network. The network, Dancejam, aspires to be a social community built around dance enthusiasts. To be honest, I’ll never use this site. I can’t dance and I only listen to the occasional rap ditty (I used ditty to describe a rap song; the defense rests). But let’s be serious here folks, for most of you reading this, the words “MC” and “Hammer” together were enough to pique your interest – they certainly prompted a flurry of google searches for me.

At first, it’s easy to dismiss the idea of a former celebrity (preacher, IRS person of interest, reality television star,…) jumping on the bandwagon of what’s “cool” and “next” to claw their way back into our collective consciousness after seeing net-based music efforts achieve massive success. But in an interview with Wired Magazine, it seems that Hammer is serious about creating a space for a community around one of his passions. In a Q and A with The Washington Post, he describes the difference between creating a social network and not simply using Youtube,

YouTube doesn’t have a community around it. You can watch a video and make comments about it, but dancing is about a whole culture. We want to be a repository for all things dance, a place where you can learn about the dance, watch it, put it in slow motion, rewind it, compete in competitions. 

This idea of an online community makes me wonder: at some point in the future, might we see the break up (or at least decline) of the massive networks (facebook, myspace, etc.) in favour of a series of smaller communities of interest? Perhaps we’ll see a social network aggregator that let’s you manage a number of different social networks in a single window allowing you to access multiple social networks at the same time. This would certainly help to address the problem of how to manage which users have access to which parts of your overall profile. In essence, from a central hub, you could invite users to any number of your networks. With the growing dataportability movement (read more here and here), this might not be as hard or as far away as you might think.