Latino of Dominican Descent Launches Social Network for the Hispanic Community Worldwide - MiMun2.com

Riding the popularity wave of social networks among young people, a web developer with Dominican roots has launched MiMun2.com | El Poder Latino A Nivel Mundial! (www.mimun2.com), a full featured web-based social network for Latino - youth from around the globe. The site hopes to bring together Latino youth of different origins both outside and inside the United States (where Latinos are now the majority), and the rest of the world.

New York, NY (PRWEB) May 22, 2006 -- The Latino population now constitutes as the majority population in the United States. The word 'Latino' or 'Hispanic' refers to a sub-culture that exists everywhere a person from a Spanish speaking Country may call home, from the streets of New York City, to Central and South America, the Carribean and Europe.

But, there is an ever increasing sense of Latino youth losing this identity, with the new generation born and raised outside of their ancestral land and unaware of their fore-fathers rich cultural heritage. Although such fears are almost always overblown, there is a need to bring young Latinos together to allow for better dialog and understanding of each other, especially since the Latino population as a whole, has so many sub-cultures within itself.

The advent of the internet has helped this process of dialog a lot, not only for the ones abroad but also for the divided populations of Latinos from the Carribean Islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, to Central and South America and Spain to name a few. But most efforts have been half-baked, with very little emphasis on the quality of design and content. Using this opportunity, Sandy Luna, an IT Consultant of Dominican origin from New York has launched the MiMun2.com social gathering network.

"MiMun2.com is not just a forum or chat room," says 31 year old Sandy, "it's a free portal which allows members to truly express themselves with blogs, quizzes, polls, music videos, forums and more". Sandy is an IT Consultant and has been developing both commercial and personal interest websites for the past 9 years.

"There isn't a shortage of Latino portals and forums." he said, adding that "almost all of them focus on one thing or the other, such as message boards or picture rating, but none do justice to even the basic service they are supposed to provide. Not that we are trying to become a Yahoo!, but we've focused on some of the core web activities of young people and packaged them into a very user-friendly interface". Asked where his site would fit in with other successful social networks like Hi5, MySpace, Latino-Oriented MiGente.com, and the likes, Sandy said there's always room for improvement and young Latino web-surfers are savvy enough to be members of more than one network. "It's like clubs in high-schools and colleges. Just because you are on a sports team doesn't mean you can't be a member of the chess club." He noted that cultural organization is great for self-discovery and awareness.

Sandy hopes that the site will work as a tool to bring together 'Latino' or 'Hispanic' youth. Already his friends and MiMun2.com members from around the globe are helping him improve the site. But for the most part, he's being helped in this endeavor by Enrique Reyes, a Dominican music producer and database guru also from New York. According to Sandy the two are working day and night to improve the site. Their next plan of action is to contact Latino cultural organizations in colleges and universities across the U.S., Europe, Canada, South and Central America, and even back home in the Dominican Republic to promote the website. Sandy, "Not only will MiMun2.com help the younger crowd make new Latino friends and learn more about their people, it will also foster a healthy sense of community where common socio-political goals are properly addressed."

MiMun2.com is currently in beta while Sandy works out the kinks and adds more features requested by members, like an apparel store that mostly sells t-shirts marketed towards Latino Culture. Sandy hopes to bring the site out of beta soon and expand into other areas as the site grows.

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