Social Networking Gone Crazy?
This morning I saw an email from a business associate. It contained a link to an article on LinkedIn. That article was actually hosted on mashup. The article was about Social Media Overload; he called it The Sharepocalypse. After reading a fairly long article pointing out all the issues with the different human interactions with the main social media providers, I wanted to add a comment. Oddly, I couldn’t unless I used either a twitter or facebook account to login.
Social Networking Overload
The social networks seem to think everyone wants to be part of their networks. That is false. People don’t care about the network, they care about connecting to other people who they know or who could help them find a better job, better circle of friends, or just keep in touch. A few actually use these networks to get personal recommendations about products or services, but that only works well for the most connected people, not average people. The social networks are each feeding off each other by cross linking everything.
A People Perspective
People just want a single place that knows their preferences for sharing. They want 3-10 groups to share with. Any more than that and it is too complicated. According to the article, the choices for sharing are already too many, so most people select the easiest choice – share everything.
Then you have the other side, people watching for updates. Some people are actually afraid they will miss something important. I must be missing lots of important things, since I don’t monitor facebook or twitter or linkedIn or any other social networks. If someone needs to include me in anything, an email works.
- People want to be on 1 or 2 social networks. Any more is overkill.
- People want to group their network circles into a few easy to understand and set groups. Some people/connections would be in multiple groups.
- People want to be able to connect to anyone else on any other social network, easily.
- People want to control their privacy settings AND really trust that those settings will work.
- People want some control over what happens to their data. If they want the data deleted, they really want it removed, including from backup tapes last year.
What’s the answer? I don’t know, but I think it needs to be federated, not centralized. I would lean towards fewer walled gardens for social data. Perhaps a standard RSS feed for each person from each social network which could be embedded into the followers own review pages? Perhaps? This way, each network would retain most of their current users as long as they met their needs. Leaving wouldn’t be like killing yourself off, since with an RSS feed, we could import our data to a different network easier. RSS makes lots of things easier, especially with appropriate tagging.
RSS is how I read content from 30+ sources daily, quickly. Not all stories are worthy of reading, but I do see the title/summary. Having an RSS feed for each persons feeds, named by the person, for FB, twitter, Identi.ca, LinkedIn, and the other networks would make this easier.
Scanning
A way to scan all your networks for contact information and who you are following. Then you could have a central place which mashed together all those feeds. To me, the real issue here would be that each network would need to play nice and provide a feed or at least not change their interfaces too much to screw up the screen scraping by other networks. A federated authentication system is needed. OAuth is headed in the right direction there.
Conclusion
I’m not even part of the social networking fad, but still feel overloaded. Now if I could just find a way to leave that comment.
