Let’s face it: many of us spend a lot of time on those social networking sites. And I’m willing to bet that most of you have accounts on more than one of them. By my last count, I’m on six different sites:
- For staying in touch with friends, I use Facebook (my favorite) and Myspace.
- To network with business colleagues, there’s LinkedIn.
- To keep current with events, we have Meetup and Upcoming.
Then there’s the multitude of other sites I’m not currently registered on: Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Live Spaces, and the list goes on…
Off topic: Notice I put Live Spaces last? The only people I know who use it are employees of Microsoft. I wouldn’t really call that “success”.
Back to the topic at hand. Simply put, there are way too many of these sites for anybody to visit daily, unless you’re unemployed, in college, etc. I’ve seen this type of thing before in other paradigms…
- Users can have several different IM accounts (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, ICQ, IRC, etc.). Instead of having multiple programs at once, new chat clients came along that solved the problem, e.g. Adium (Mac OS X), Gaim (cross-platform), and Trillian (Windows).
- Who doesn’t have more than one e-mail account? Clients like Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform) can create a “global” Inbox to collect messages from all your accounts; when you write new messages, you can choose what account you’re writing from.
So, where’s the program or website to manage all the social networking sites? Couldn’t you imagine it?
- You’d have one area to read and write all “public” messages; these would map to your MySpace comments, your Facebook wall, etc.
- Another part of the program/site collects your private messages.
- Contacts could be grouped by service; you could create “meta-contacts” that represents the same person on multiple services.
- Etc.
Is this out there? Is someone creating this? Have I just lost a million dollar idea? By the way, if this service is out there, the would-be creator has not done a great job of promoting their innovation.
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One of the CMU MHCI projects last year addressed something along these same lines actually. Check out SocialStream.
But I definitely agree. The Web 2.0 phenomenon revolves around great experiences that you share with other people. When it was new, it was a great idea. But now I feel like it’s just gotten out of hand… yes, having a social networking site for movie recommendations, telling people what I’m doing at a given moment, and restaurant recommendations is nice and potentially fun, but like you say, it’s a huge time investment.
The only way any of these sites are valuable to me is if (a) all my friends are on there, or (b) I spend enough time finding people whose opinions and recommendations I trust. The former is becoming more and more unlikely with each new Web 2.0 site, and the latter takes way too much time!!
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/arbitrarymusing/
Syndication of various blog/journal sites has made things a little easier, esp for me since I just use LJ and checking your blog any other way would be annoying as all hell.
i totally agree! which is why i don’t even bother setting up accounts on myspace, friendster, or facebook; i just don’t have the time to read all the stuff that gets posted there. when i was unemployed, i joined tribe and had a great time interacting with people with like interests. but once i landed a full-time job, there went tribe. the last time i checked it was easily over a month ago. so if i want to know about something, it has to come to me via email or else i’ll never find about it. and that’s if i get around to reading that email message in the first place.
by the way, meebo.com’s good for linking your AIM, yahoo, gmail, and MSN IM accounts. i log on when i feel like being sociable and want to chat with everyone and anyone on all my different accounts.
lastly, thanks for adding me to the list of blogs you read… at least i know there’s someone out there who can put up with my rambling on and on about things that are meaningless to anyone but me