Comments on: Escape from social network frenzy?

From FriendFeed to Pulse and Digsby, there's no shortage of sites that want to help you make sense of it all. Meet the "lifestreamer."

[svk1069]

Social Dashboard?

Isn't that what the new NetVibes "Ginger" release aims to provide?

My choice, though not the most popular, is Plaxo's Pulse.

[aerosky1229]

It is up to users, not computers...

If the social meshup application is truly the solution to everything, it could already have done. While we do not own the very intelligent artificial intelligence algorithm to perfectly filter out only wanted information, we can come up with the social meshup application or whatever.

The problem is actually with people. In your computer, for instance, how many programs and games have we installed that never get used? I know many gamers who have installed old classics like starcraft and half-life, but they never get played because they are busy playing new generation games. Do we really need 1 trillion bytes of hard drives while already seen videos and "never-to-listen-again" music sit around your hard disks somewhere? Users download and install gigabytes of softwares and videos on their computers and blame their computers for being slow. But of course, the computer will slower because the processor has a hard time partitioning the drive if the memory gets larger. What about the internet? Do we really need billions of domain names where most of them do not even have any useful content? This practice of creating a domain name to sell later is called "domain parking," but the creators are just greedy about selling the domain names on Ebay.

I also had the accounts in MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Xanga, Cyworld, and some other "now-don't-remember" blog sites. I found the Facebook most useful, though I do not really use that either anymore, and I end up deactivating other accounts. If you want useful informations to get to you, you can do so by using RSS technology and just use some conditional statements to filter out only useful information. That is, if you really bothered by the flow of information, and that is a personal problem not everyone has.

[bbmorph]

Who Cares What We're Up To?

The concept of lifestreaming bores me to tears. I don't want to know that my friend has just bought an ice cream and I don't want tell my friends that I have. The occassional, major announcement is of course very useful, however, and maybe there's a need to filter content (algorithmically, perhaps) for the more important messages.

Now, in agreement with Oz Sultan, if Lifestreaming is a way into cornering the market for everyone having one, portable profile (we've a recent blog post on this - http://www.rmmlondon.com/archive/social-media-futures-persistant-profiles/) then there's great value for the winning provider, because that indeed would be hugely beneficial for us all. But OpenSocial and the OpenSocial Foundation seem to be ahead of everyone at the moment.

[Sknygrydg07]

Agenda for Importance

Important and 'major events' are dependent on the person they affect. Getting ice cream may be a big deal to a recovering anorexic. The quantity and quality of communication in a relationship is determined by the participants and should not be subjugated to outside determinants of importance. If you're bored - turn off the computer and go outside.

[savvyzkg]

Streamlining preferred

Thank you for this post. What a relief to know that someone who is highly involved in Social Networking can feel overwhelmed. I was beginning to feel like a Social Networking WIMP as I'm trying to navigate and contribute to all these sites. With so many people talking about how great Social Networking is, it's nice to hear that some might actually appreciate a way to streamline the process.

[WeCanDoBIZ]

Aggregators need to offer SSO

Aggregators as they exist are barely doing anything useful. To have the minutiae of my contacts lives all neatly packaged to one place isn't of interest - if anything, the constant stream of detritus is what will turn me off social networking. Much more interesting is the rest of the content of such sites, the contacts I could be making, the groups being established, none of which find their way to the aggregators.

I think this space will disappear before too soon to be replaced with something closer to a social networking/media launchpad, with single sign on straight into where the value is. There is no doubt in my mind the most useful social networks will be the most specialist ones, appealing to an interest group or specific need. It will be impossible for the current crop of aggregators to keep track, so I think a few "portals" will come along (Google, Microsoft, Clickpass perhaps) that offer aggregation of destinations, not content, with single sign on into each.

And the sooner people stop obsessing with micro-blogging the better!

Ian Hendry
www.wecando.biz