As someone reminded me last week, I have a Facebook page. I don't know why I have a Facebook page, it must have seemed relevant at some point, and I'm sure it would still be relevant if it weren't for the too-many other social networking sites I use. I'm not even sure which ones I have anymore, so I try to take inventory from time to time. OK, so the mysterious unused Facebook account tops the list, along with Linkedin for professional contacts. Linkedin works for me, and I've used it with success on more than one occasion when looking for a past colleague or needed some work done. I have a page on Model Mayhem and OMP. Let's not forget the requisite del.icio.us account, a myYahoo page, a Google account, several dozen forums I neither read nor post to. I have accounts at Bloglines, Digg, Technorati, and I'm sure plenty other blog lists, none of which have done shit for this blog. I have support accounts at too darn many vendor support sites, and email accounts I've long lost track of.

So when is enough enough? I don't have the energy to track it all, or the time to generate networks everywhere everyone else is. I can't help but wonder what happened to the open Web. All these systems, these networking tools, portals, lists, and other things, are all closed systems; I need an account on their servers, and have no view outside them. Information, network contacts, it all gets siloed in each application, and often the list is recreated over and over in separate places. My email contact list, for instance, serves as the starting point for Facebook, which creates those contacts again in the context of a social network. That same email list starts a Linkedin account, and so on and so forth until I have the same list of contacts repeated many times, each with a certain percentage of unique entries. Contacts I've picked up along the way in any one of the social places online.

The associated messaging systems of these sites do little to foster communication. They foster confusion since they, too, are closed systems. To see messages on MM for instance I have to go to the site. I don't get them in a central place, they are not RSS enabled (which would solve a whole host of problems) and are, thus, islands of information. Most sites work this way, it is not just this one, and they are kind enough send me an email when I have a new message, tag or comment, but few actually include the message, tag or comment, or a way to message, tag, or comment back without having to find a browser, log in, and do so in a most time consuming way.

These sites have found their limitations. They are certainly OK for sharing playlists and poking friends during class, but in a professional capacity, managing contacts and networks across sites is exhausting. Without a way to manage and aggregate information remotely (there's that RSS again), they become strained, and while I could use just one site, I doubt contacts and colleagues like receiving invitations to yet another social network any more than I do. The choice of site should be a personal one, but the information should be open, available to anyone with or without an account to be truly usable. Without the openness, Web 2.0 is really nothing more than Bubble 2.0 waiting to burst.

Technorati tags: social networking, networking, facebook, technorati, web 2.0 contacts, tracking

Del.icio.us tags: social networking, networking, facebook, technorati, web 2.0 contacts, tracking