blog.philcrissman.com

I’ve started thinking along these lines before, but seeing hellotxt.com this evening started me thinking about it again.

The Problem

Social Networking is a great tool; it’s a cool thing. It’s not going away, and there are quite a few of them out there that are doing quite well. That’s the problem. There are a lot of them, and a lot of the people who like this sort of thing wind up with memberships on many of them. Some of them are more directly competitive with each other, but in general, the successful social networking sites have unique features which compel people to keep multiple accounts — most people don’t seem to give up one service in favor of another. Instead, they just add the new tool to their pantheon of social networks. Myspace, Facebook, Virb, Bebo, Digg, Vox, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku… phew. The list could continue.

It’s this sort of mess that makes concepts like hellotxt work: Here! You can send out some information to multiple places at once. Your life will be better.

It’s a good tool, but doesn’t solve the problem.

Yes, you could post a blurb to multiple places at once, but if you want to follow a conversation, you still need to visit or otherwise check with each site you posted to. Beyond that, since the different sites have different features, you’re still somewhat restricted. You can type as many characters as you want on some sites; only 140 on twitter.

So the tool is good, for what it’s intended; it’s the whole social networking scene that’s a mess. Multiple sites, multiple networks, multiple profiles, multiple relationships with the same people on different networks, some networks with a thousand friends, some networks with none. Wouldn’t it be nice to just… wrap it all up somehow?

It’s Complicated

I started thinking of it like this: you have an online presence, in a manner of speaking. That presence is made up of some static content, and probably a lot of dynamic content. Static content might include your bio on MySpace, your personal information on Facebook, your “About” page on your blog, your mini-bio on Twitter — and so on. The dynamic content might consist of blog posts (maybe on multiple blogs), tweets, pownces, flickr photostreams: basically, a whole list of RSS feeds.

To complicate things, your online presence has connections to other people’s online presences. You may be friends with a large group of people on MySpace, have a similarly large but only partially overlapping group of friends on Facebook, be following and followed by different overlapping groups on Twitter… So if you try to picture your online presence as the cluster of the social networking services you use, you will have multiple connections to some other people’s presences. To some, you may only have a single connection. Some connections will be mutual, others will be one way; people who follow you, people you follow, but not reciprocated. In other words, another huge mess.

Partial Solutions

There have been some partial solutions to a lot of these things. On Tumblr, for example, you might have all your feeds aggregated together. Great. But you can’t view replies or conversation threads; you can’t see the comments which a blog post may have attracted. You can’t easily filter it on the fly to see only specific feeds.

Theoretically you could use an online feed aggregator, Google Reader for example, and subscribe to the RSS feed of all your personal feeds, and share each item as it comes; and also subscribe to the RSS feeds of every single person you follow or are linked to on the other social networks. Not just blog feeds, but twitter feeds, pownce feeds, and so on. Theoretically. In practice that would be time-consuming, unwieldy, and would still lack the ability to more easily follow conversation threads, or view direct messages from some services.

When Google’s OpenSocial was announced, I thought that maybe it would hold a promise of integrating the social networking spaghetti knot which was quickly forming. Now, I don’t think so; it’s a shared API, but the main goal seems to be the creation of 3rd party apps which could work on multiple social networks. I haven’t yet seen any sign that it has the capacity, or even the goal, of allowing integration of multiple social networking profiles in to one, aggregate, online presence.

Brave New Tools?

So, how could the mess be resolved?

I see an application something like a blog, but more sophisticated. It uses the open APIs of other networks to collect all of your feeds, friends, and followers, in one place. All your static content might appear on one or two pages. The dynamic content could be aggregated into a superfeed, or filtered to see only specific feeds. Using the APIs (or plugins, if necessary), you could also view the replies and/or comments to the various services.

The drawback to this would be the APIs; anyone who chose not to have an API, or who made it difficult to write a plugin, would not be able to join the party. You might be able to include Facebook, Twitter, & Pownce… but not Myspace. And so on.

So… it could be that the meta-social-networking app I just described is not even technically possible. If it is, it could still be impossible to do certain things. The whole idea would be to make an application which would negate the need for you to ever actually visit the other sites, just like a feed reader negates the need for you to browse a few dozen websites to see what they’ve been talking about. Well, restrictions in some APIs would make this implausible, if not impossible at the moment. Lack of an API would exclude others altogether.

A good idea? Maybe. I think so. Is it possible to build a comprehensive prototype? Not unless any and all social networking sites are willing to play ball. Considering that most of them have a business model focused on displaying ads, there would be very little motivation for them to cooperate with an application whose goal is to make it easier to not visit their site.

So for now, I guess this application will be fulfilled by Firefox, with a handful of bookmarks, saved passwords, and five or six open tabs.

Come to think of it, that actually is working pretty well.

Image from the completely unrelated Metabolic Network Modelling page on wikipedia.