The Issue:
The sweet smell of social napalm in the morning. Gotta love it…or hate it…or just have a headache from checking all 95 social network accounts that you created for various niches you’re interested in. I have a Facebook account. I have a MySpace account. I have accounts at skateboards.com, surfboards.com, and snowboards.com. All these I use to connect with others but for various reasons. The maintenance is overwhelming if I want to be active on all these. When I say active I don’t mean like the 14 year old kids talking non-sense all day on MySpace. I mean like the professional collective I’m part of on these sites to discuss art, photography, politics, education, parenting (I have 3 sons), social psychology issues, etc.
I do want to continue to be a part of the communities/collectives that I’m part of but I wish I didn’t have to work so hard to update them.
Possible Solution?
Companies have already created widgets and badges for MySpace, Facebook, etc. to put on their various sites but I’d like to see a couple things take it a step further. A standard social networking API that uses a core simple standard dataset for photos and their info, interests, hobbies, avatar, etc. that you could manage from a NetVibes-esque portal, serving as your admin console to manage all your pages at once from one place. One might think companies would avoid that so that they could continue to “stand out” from other social sites but my argument is everyone has a social network now using various 3rd party out of the box social networks. The criteria on most of these is generally the same as far as the data set goes so why not standardize again the dataset/vars for the base information on all these sites, similar to what was done for ecommerce and passing variables to companies like verisign, authorize.net, etc.
If someone could just do this for me by tomorrow morning that would be great, then I wouldn’t have to upload photos 8 times, update my avatar 8 times, update my status 8 times, etc. It’s already nice that text’ing Twitter updates my status on my own blogs and Facebook. Too bad I can’t roll that concept across all social network sites.
</SocialNetworkingRant>
