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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