It’s 2008. We are all now spewing information about ourselves in every which way. This is great for sharing our lives online and using the internet as a social medium. The only problem with this is that this system begins to break down more with each additional service that you use. And you have to use multiple services, since you have different friends and audiences on each. You have no choice in the matter. What’s worse, they don’t always often almost-ever play well together. It’s like they don’t even care about you.
Even when there are good tools for brining in content from different services those tools aren’t yet perfect. And the same could be said for tools helping you publish content as well. Things are improving in this area but the lack of features in the tools are only half of the problem.
To illustrate the problem let’s pick 3 services at random which have an overlapping feature. I’ll go with three really popular ones: Facebook, MySpace and Flickr. You probably have accounts on 2 or 3 of these right now as you’re reading this. And if you use them at all, you probably post pictures to them. All three of them let you tag these pictures with additional information like who’s in the picture. When you have new pictures you want to share online, you now have to upload them to all 3 services by individually logging into each service and repeating the process 3 times in a row. What a pain.
That’s totally completely broken and ass-backwards from how things should work. The services should get your pictures from you. You should be able to say “Hey Facebook, here are my pictures, add them to ones you are displaying”. And then if your audience is similar you could then say “Hey MySpace, look in the same place”. Now you update your pictures in only that one place — which is hopefully a place you own since they are YOUR pictures. And it shouldn’t just be pictures, it should be your status updates, you’re shared links, and everything you are publishing online to the same or similar audiences. And believe me, the stuff you publish online is going to increase as the barriers to entry continue to lower. Can someone say YouTube?
In part 2 of this series we will talk about current social networks and why some are full of fail.
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