Social Network Hell

2/29/2008

A few years ago my sister asked me to see why her computer was running so slowly. I looked and found she had installed Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, AOL AIM, ICQ, and several others I did not know existed. I promptly introduced her to Miranda which does all of them. I asked her why she had all of these, and she said "So I can talk to everyone". Most of these programs (especially ICQ) are notable memory pigs. Her IM programs used more memory than Outlook and Windows combined. This is where I think we are headed with all the new "social networks" I'm being asked to join.

I am not here to promote one social network over the other. I joined LinkedIn because I got a lot of requests from people I wanted to keep current with. Then I started getting a lot of Facebook requests. Honestly, I don't actually "use" Facebook, but joined it so I could keep access to current contact details of contacts. So that puts me on Facebook and LinkedIn. Managing two such networks is acceptable.

And competition is a good thing isn't it? But now I am getting occasional requests from Naymz, Pulse/Plaxo, and a zillion regional wannabee social networks. It's all getting too much.

If I don't accept your invitation...

It is not because I don't like you. Its simply that I do not want to manage half a dozen or more social networks with nearly identical offerings. I'm on both LinkedIn and Facebook - both of which probably cover 90% of the social network subscribers anyways. If you want to link to me - find me there.

The Solution?

I'm not sure what the solution is. Hopefully CardSpace and other Identity providers will be used soon by these social networks to alleviate some of the issues. Furthermore - maybe they could agree on permissible information sharing (subject to the persons permission of course) so that users could choose a network for the features they want, but still "reach" others on other networks.

But the solution definitely is not for dozens of little clones to pop up that offer less or no differing features than the big boys. Competition is useful, repetitive cloning and fragmentation is not.

<< Previous Entry  Next Entry >>

Use my contact form to contact me directly.