• BusinessWeek, Friday, October 27, 2006 11:47 AM

Public radio thought of social networking long before MySpace's Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. Bill King, president of American Public Media Group, one of the largest producers and distributors of public radio programming, says that in April 2000, he and a few Silicon Valley VCs came together to develop a social network based on the common interests of public radio's listeners. Then the Nasdaq crashed.

Five years later, King's idea was reborn: Gather.com, a social network for over-35s, who are highly educated and interested in politics and culture, has been live now for about a year. The idea is that public-radio listeners have more in common than many demographic groups in America. Chat room topics range from spirituality to food and wine to politics.

Do grownups want a place to hang out online? The site had just 77,000 uniques as of September, compared with MySpace's 173 million. This is a demographic group that still prefers to read its news in paper form. They use the Web for specific tasks, like email and looking up specific information. Most may not want to spend hours online listening to loudmouths spout their political views.

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