I got poked by three men last night — all of them handsome and talented. There was a novelist, a musician and ... well, I never actually got round to talking about jobs with the last one. Suffice to say, he was gorgeous.

It’s been a busy time. The night before, I was offered a ride on a private jet by this great guy from New York. And today? Oh, you know, I just made friends with Paris Hilton and Kelly Osbourne.

No, I haven’t been whoring myself out on the social circuit. I’ve been sitting at home, in my slippers, in front of my computer. All of this, you see, is just a normal part of everyday life on the internet’s buzziest “social networking sites”.

The virtual world is a glamorous place these days. Socialising on the internet may have started out as the preserve of the no-mate nerd and unsigned bands desperate for an audience, but for anyone who considers themselves remotely with it, networking sites are now merely another way to communicate. It’s like mobile phones were about 15 years ago.

So, the poke wasn’t literal, it was virtual — the cyber equivalent of a friendly hello, on a site called www.facebook.com. The private jet was offered on www.asmallworld.net, where, if you ask a favour, someone, somewhere, will usually try to help. And on www.myspace.com, making “friends” with the stars is very easy.

MySpace, of course, is the name that has hit the headlines over the past year, but that is only half the story. There is a whole world of virtual communities out there, servicing 250m regular social networkers from every conceivable niche. These are communities built on shared interests: from high society (asmallworld) to hip-hop (www.hiphopcrack.com); from harried new mums (www.mumsnet.com) to teens (www.bebo.com); from poker nuts (www.pokerwink.com) to industrial goths (www.vampirefreaks.com). The question is not whether you are part of a social network — of course you are, darling — it’s which one.

“E-mail is inefficient and outdated,” says Oli Barrett, whose firm, Connected Capital, advises companies on how to harness the latest in web innovation. “Now you can broadcast to all the people you know — with images, film and music — in a way that doesn’t have to interrupt anyone.”

“Cool kids don’t ask for mobile numbers any more. They track down your online profile.” Barrett cannot overstate how important he thinks these sites are. “Social networking is the future of communication.”

And, for the most part, the communication is friendly. When the world edits itself into groups with similar interests or ambitions, something soft and fluffy happens. The phenomenon of “paying it forward” means to give unconditionally — the opposite of paying it back. “You’ll be privy to all sorts of random acts of kindness in your community,” Barrett promises. “The spirit is very much winning by sharing, and that comes around incredibly quickly online.”

Ask and you shall receive. Sounds good to me. But could the world of social networking actually be a land of new and potentially limitless opportunities? How far could a thirtysomething girl-about-town like me push her luck in cybersociety? Like a lot of people, I’ve had a MySpace page for a while, but I’ve never done anything with it. Perhaps it was time I did.

Armed with a set of far-fetched (and frivolous) social ambitions — A-list friends, A-list lifestyle — I decided to find out.

FIRST STOP: MYSPACE

Now with more than 128m members globally, MySpace is the America of the social-networking world — vast, diverse, commercial and fundamentally shallow. Anyone who is young and hip is on, and a few others besides. There are some 3m “artists”, seekers of celebrity and celebrities, those who are looking for an outlet for their (alter) ego, and increasingly, anyone suffering a midlife crisis.

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