MySpace has long played a significant role in the marketing strategy of musicians who often have a profile on MySpace and use the social network to connect with fan. But the recent creation of Thisis50.com, a social network for fans of 50 Cent, is just the latest in a line of musicians like Ludacris (www.wemix.com) who have broken away from large social networks to form their own.

Utilizing the tools provided by Ning, the creation of personal social network for 50 Cent was not a difficult task. The hard part has already been done, the only thing needed is putting on the finishing touches to personalize it to 50 Cent.

Tools like Ning and Flux enable artists to quickly and easily take control of their own social network. This gives them the ability to interact with fans in a way that they are unable to on large social networks like MySpace.

This is the evolution of social networks. The tools are there for people to easily create their own social network, and social networks are increasingly becoming standard components of websites -- much like discussion forums have long been a staple of community-oriented websites.

The downside of these personal social networks is that they create an increasing burden on the user. As websites evolve social networking as a standard component, we will all eventually belong to multiple social networks, which means that much more time taken to maintain our friends list, update our profiles, etc.

As Paul Glazowski at Mashable hints, this puts more emphasis on OpenSocial and other technologies that will help make maintaining multiple social networks easier. We can just hope that these technologies emerge before we become buried under too many social networks.

(Image of Thisis50.com)