social network fatigue
September 5, 2007 - 8:35 PM
The topic of social network fatigue came up the other day. Something I think we have all begun to feel. It seems a new social network pops up almost every month. Some stay around, some fall by the way side. What's hot changes quickly and users will move form one service to another some even use multiple services. I myself use Facebook, pownce, Last.fm and a few others I am forgetting.
Having to keep friend lists up to date on all my social sites takes way too much time. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to store my relationships with friends in a decentralized manner? Someplace where I can store them and have them imported and synced to the various social sites. But in order to do that we would need some sort of standard format to store all that information, something everyone can support.
As it turns out some people have been working on this problem for a while. The microformats group have come up with a pretty good solution based on open standards that already exist. Combining the already existing formats like hCard and XFN they are able to define a person as well as their relationship to others. The idea being when you signed up to your new favorite social site you would be able to give a url to your profile and the system would be able to see those relationships and create them for you in this new site. This still leaves open how to sync changes later but it is a step in the right direction. It also won't work for sites that keep this information behind authentication. Not to mention that the goal of sites like Facebook is to be the "clearing house" for all things social.
This topic is still fairly new and a lot of work is left to be done. But there is a huge potential for someone to create a solution, something along the lines of OpenID where anyone can be a provider and data can easily be moved between providers. Where you own your information and it is not tied to any given service. Of course even if you find good solution getting the social sites to support it is something entirely different.
