NEW YORK — Forget Facebook, MySpace or any other online hangout that boasts tens or hundreds of millions of people.

For Teresa Munoz, Athlinks (population: 34,000) is the place to be. She uses the community devoted to competitive running, swimming and biking events to find training partners and get advice, including information about her first Ironman triathlon.

Munoz, 45, of Hacienda Heights, Calif., said she tried finding like-minded people on MySpace, but found only those "looking for people to date, not really there for the sport. I didn't get as much out of that."

MySpace, Facebook and, to a smaller degree, Bebo may be getting most of the attention, but social-networking sites geared toward hobbies, sports and other specific interests — alongside those targeting certain age groups, ethnicities or diseases — are finding growing success as supplements to the larger online hangouts or even as replacements....

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 It started innocently enough: last month a friend sent me a virtual lily plant on Facebook and invited me to create a (Lil) Green Patch, a digital garden that would grow on my profile page, and that any of my friends could help water, weed and plant. Sounds cute, right? Not if you've recently suffered through an overwhelming slew of requests to give a grain of rice, send good karma and rate your friends on everything including their hotness, creativity, fashion sense and intelligence. I wasn't merely skeptical — I was annoyed. But I didn't want to be a killjoy — and I love plants — so I went ahead and clicked "Accept." That is the moment I became part of Facebook's fastest-growing problem: application overload, a.k.a. Facebook fatigue. Like thousands of users before me, I started spamming my friends with requests to grow Green Patches of their own. When they did, I bombarded them with more plants and decorations for their gardens. (Lil) Green Patch is one of the 15 most popular add-on applications on Facebook, according to Adonomics.com, and it has more than 350,000 active users.

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Americans are growing more comfortable with young people's use of the internet - including social-networking sites, chat rooms and email - according to the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee (CICAC), MarketingCharts reports.

Among the findings of the study conducted by Zogby International survey, together with 463 Communications, on behalf of CICAC:

• 27.7 percent of Americans in the 2008 survey said social-networking sites and chat rooms should be restricted to adults, compared with 35.3 percent who had said so in an identical 2007 survey:

• However, many seniors over age 70 said children should wait until adulthood before chatting and social-networking: 38.3 percent said so in '08, up from 34.6 percent in '07.

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