Money used to be a taboo subject. Not anymore, thanks to Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which have created a generation willing to talk about anything and everything online. Several new sites are incorporating that impulse into the world of money, blending social networking with personal finance.

“It comes from the whole MySpace generation. Once people become comfortable being social online, it extends into other areas, such as personal finance,” co-founder of NetworthIQ, which allows people to publicly keep track of their assets, Ryan Williams, said.

The online communities focus on different aspects of personal finance, from investing to budgeting to borrowing and lending money. But the founders of the sites all say they are trying to accomplish the same thing: to get people to make better financial decisions.

Too many people in their 20s and 30s have become addicted to their debit and credit cards, no longer carrying cash in favor of the convenience of plastic, a co-founder of Geezeo, Peter Glyman, said.

That has made them “detached from their finances,” he said. “They’re not balancing a checkbook, which in some ways forces people to look more closely at their finances. It creates a problem for the consumer in that they’re becoming further removed, but it allowed products like ours to get them closer.”

Sites such as Geezeo, which launched about a year ago, and Wesabe.com, which launched in November 2006 and has about 100,000 users, act as online versions of Quicken or Microsoft Money, allowing people to upload their bank and credit card information to track their spending. On Geezeo, users can also set goals such as “Reduce spending by” and “Save $2,000 in an Emergency Fund” and encourage each other to accomplish them.

Although being able to open up about finances is not a bad thing, financial planners say users should be leery about taking advice from people they don’t know. Most participants on these personal finance sites do not reveal their names.