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Monday, December 18, 2006

Multiple Social Networks

Luis Suarez and Dennis McDonald have posted about the issues with the large number of social networking sites:

In these posts they discuss the fact that with as many social networking sites (and I would add other kinds of Web 2.0 sites), there is inherent friction both with sign-up and with on-going use of multiple sites. Luis, Dennis and I (and I'm sure lots of folks) have all gone through the decision of whether to spend time signing up and using another site. The benefit of signing up is participation with that group of individuals. The disadvantage is time.

I've had several conversations recently where someone wanted me to be involved in their network and my strong suggestion was to figure out how to use my blog's RSS feed within their network so I could continue to do what I'm doing now, but allow me to open up the conversation with more people. Theoretically, this will start to happen with solutions like PeopleAggregator, but for now, there is definitely a barrier.

1 comment:

Dennis D. McDonald said...

Thanks very much for the comments, Tony. There has to be an easy way to create and manage multiple social networks.

I'm not sure that "standard profiles" are the entire answer, though. Perhaps the solution is related to both (1) the quality of the connections in the network and (2) the quality of the interactions the network supports.

Yes, I'm working on definitions of what I mean by the term "quality"!