Deborah Hill Cone: Exclusive website has its own special message: Get lost

You would think by the time you got to my age you would be immune to peer pressure. Or at least have developed some face-saving Groucho Marx insouciance; pretending not to want to be a member of any club that would have you.

Sadly, no. I am shamefully keen to join the online social networking site aSmallWorld, nicknamed Snobster. I am bored with Facebook, and aSmallWorld is the place to go if you want to buy some polo ponies in a hurry or need to hire a corporate jet for the weekend. It will be so useful for me on a daily basis, I can tell.

aSmall World (aSW) is an uber-exclusive version of Facebook - MySpace for millionaires, the Wall Street Journal called it. The log-in page, a teaser for non-members, this week has stories on Milan, Buenos Aires and the hottest socialites or "fame gamers". "One minute I'm a poor Midwestern student; the next I'm seated between George Clooney and Lindsay Lohan at Bungalow 8."

There are people known for fainting at the La Perla Christmas party, people who drink beer at 8am "as a nightcap", and someone whose low point was the "lipstick incident" at Ralph Lauren. So aSmallWorld obviously fulfils its aim to "stimulate social and political debate and foster relationships within the community". That would be the caviar-connoisseur community, I guess.

aSmallWorld is invitation-only, natch, and those are hard to come by. Of its 300,000 members, only 8 per cent have invitation privileges.

aSmallWorld - note the pretentious small "a" - was created by Erik Wachtmeister, a former investment banker and graduate of Insead Business School, who came up with the idea while boar hunting in Germany. As you do.

aSmallWorld "members are people with large personal networks, frequent travel and highly active personally". Also an ESL grasp of the rudiments of English grammar, it would seem.

Wired magazine says aSW is the online haunt for supermodels, celebutantes and Eurotrash. I certainly don't fit any of those categories, yet strangely I feel affronted that I can't join.

The fact that I give a toss is deeply depressing. I guess I was fostering some utopian whimsy that as long as you had a broadband connection and a bit of attitude, you could be part of some global Venn diagram of connectedness. I was a muggins. Despite what Kevin Roberts says, when you're based in New Zealand you're simply stuck on the edge.

This week I Googled myself and found recent columns of mine linked to on the USA Today and Wall Street Journal websites. Thanks guys, so this is globalisation huh? You can be part of the media village but just don't expect to be paid for it or allowed past the virtual velvet rope.

And so much for the internet being loosey-goosey. In aSmallWorld there are strict rules. You are not allowed to approach people you do not know, which rather seems to defeat the purpose of networking.

If you are found to have behaved uncouthly you will not be warned but next time you log on, instead of a blue homepage and postings about new It bags or Havana nightclub recommendations, you'll see a green page and the lamentations of the outcasts. You will have been banished to aBigWorld - the dreadfully nonexclusive sister site of aSW.

Because despite the sophistication of today's tweeting, bleeping, blogging, podcasting era, our status-seeking behaviour is just as crude as any stone age man, or Jane Austen-era social climber.

Of course the really tragic thing is that I am just as much of a pretentious wanker as those aSmallWorld members. I've got a photogenic dog, a big collection of vintage sunglasses, an unfinished film script on my Macbook and I like to stay at the Chateau Marmont when I'm in LA. I'd fit in fine on aSW.

A Geneva member, also with poor grammar, wrote: "One of my friends, a funny old-timer here, told me that the site has lowered so much its level, that she has invited her maids."

Funny really, as I only heard about aSmallWorld from my Buenos Aires nanny.

deborah@coneandco.com