This past couple of weeks has been one conversation after another with prospects and clients about building social Web sites for their unique customer and member audiences. Not that I’m complaining — it’s fun work to imagine how businesses can create communities where they previously had unrelated individual customers.
But all this talk underscores the fact that social networks are spawning like Sea Monkeys. I can count at least 12 networks that I belong to. That’s 12 profiles. Twelve sets of friends, favorites, RSS feeds, yada yada. It also underscores the growing need to help users rope in all their social networking activity.
Really, this is just an extension of the problem of having too many logins and passwords (which I don’t think has been completely solved). Except, that now in addition to just login info, we’re maintaining videos, photos, links, RSS feeds, blog posts, comments, bios, friends, pokes, walls and whatever bits of data and metadata you can conceive of.
At Factory City, Chris Messina suggests that “social network fatigue” is indeed a problem and that efforts are underway to create an identity layer that would help users pry their personal info, friends and other preferences free from the clutches of social networks. The idea is that if you could have one identity, one global whitelist and one list of blocked users to manage, then those preferences could be applied to all the social networks you belong to. Joining a new network would be matter of connecting your identity with the network…and voila! No more of that tiresome routine of entering your profile, your friends, your contact info. The time savings for online daters would be staggering.
As Messina puts it, “having consistent identifiers for the same person across multiple networks, services or applications is going to be fundamental to getting the next evolution of the web right.”
In my mind, this change would be akin to the widespread move to RSS, which helped free up content from its originating source. Which, in turn, makes me wonder: will there be a demand for social network aggregation? Will there be “readers” that let you see what’s happening and then apply changes universally to all your networks?
October 24th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Don,
Speaking of the flood in social networking sites, check out this lengthy list:
http://mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/
And people were worried that the Internet would cause everyone to become isolated and anti-social. Sheesh. Maybe now is a good time to start my networking site for owners of 3-legged mini labradoodles in the Pacific Northwest.
M