You never know what people are going to react to something on a blog. When I lamented about all my various profiles, I did so out of frustration but I struck something out there, because I've heard from a surprising number of people with work arounds, hacks, tricks or whatever on how to deal with so many profiles.
Everything from Mahalo's ability to load different social networking sites in an iFrame, to Friendfeed's aggregation of a number social sites, to facebook apps to consolidate all my functionality down to just a few sites.
The problem here is that they're all kludgy. There's no elegant solution that cleanly allows me to solve this problem. What exactly is the problem? There's two. As a content producer, I want to be able to reach as many people as possible. So cutting myself off from certain communities is setting myself up for failure. We're past the point on the internet where if you build it, people simply come. There's too much content being created for any one person or group of people to be able to find and filter what they like.
The second problem is that I want to be able to find content that I like in a limitless sea of content that's being created. That's where the real power of these social networks comes into play. They act as a giant recommendation machine, so the more people I'm connected with who share my tastes, the better I'm able to find cool stuff online.
But my giant recommendation machine only works if we're all connected in some meaningful way. If it's me and two friends listening to the same mixtape over and over again in my bedroom, we're not going to find a lot of new music. If I'm connected to promoters, friends, artists, etc there's a much better chance I'm going to find what I actually like.
And that's why all these profiles annoy me. I could just pick a few networks to belong to and stick there but then I'm limiting the interactions I have based on bullshit technical barriers that don't need to exist. Just the fact that all these sites are walled gardens who refuse to share data with each other. It doesn't make any sense, it's like having an email system where those with gmail accounts can only talk to other people with gmail accounts. If you want to talk to someone at yahoo, you have to go over there and start an account as well.
I think these social networks have a tremendous amount of value inherent in them, mostly because they mirror the real life networks we use every day. But until they stop trying to lock their users in, that value isn't going to be realized. We've seen walled gardens fail on the internet over and over again. I'm just waiting for this current set of walled gardens to either fail or evolve. Unfortunately they're doing neither fast enough.
Posted by Ben Corman at 12:08 PM