i'm entering my 7th year of blogging, though not at the same online location - this specific blog is not yet 4 years old and i have numerous other blogs, including my personal blog which contains my more mundane & family related posts...
awhile ago i setup a simple portal page so that i could point folks to a place that contains links to my various online points of presence: my blogs, photos, videos, email, bookmarks, instant msg and an about page detailing my background (after all transparency is important) - then social networks started popping up all over the place and as part of my job (but also my interest in emerging media) i joined and experienced the best and the worst of them...
some i found immediate value in and some i knew right away would be a waste of time, but all required some level of engagement - profile creation followed by a moderate amount of time invested to grok their environment, features and culture before being able to tell if they'd actually be of value longer term or not...
the ones that i gauged had some value still required a certain amount of time commitment, so this is where the fragmentation comes in - instead of putting all of my online presence into a single blog its now about time management and juggling communities of interest at locations all over the web...
in looking at sites/tools that have a social element to them, i find that my time could be spent on twitter, pownce, jaiku, facebook, flickr, del.cio.us, ebay, msft spaces, yahoo mash, linkedin, yahoo groups, amazon, google reader, skype, gtalk, aim, blip.tv, youtube, second life, podcast.com, mybloglog and most recently seesmic & photophlow - some such as the last two need complete focus while interacting to get the most out of them and some need minimal attention to participate (such as twitter) but all are meant to create a sense of community, interaction and belonging - as well as all give you the ability to create some level of profile telling others about yourself...
the real decision comes down to how much time do you spend engaged and interacting with one or many of these social tools at a time (or at all for that matter) - every site that has some perceived value for you will provide at a minimum a sense of community and culture, some participants will overlap across tools (so most mutual followers in seesmic tend to also doing the same on twitter) and some provide net new participants per tool, thus completely new online relationships are formed via these new community tools - this to me ends up being the hidden gem of todays fragmented online world and i personally think its a good thing...
there are a multitude of social sites, more launching every day - some would consider them wastes of time (of course some are just that) but most will provide someone some level of community and exposure to new folks of interest, again a good thing...
based on what i've experienced to-date - i don't think a single social site/tool will end up being everything to everybody, just seems to me it'd end up being to sprawled with features and cumbersome to interact w/ - simple purpose and functionality are highly valued online, twitter is a great example of this dynamic (yet they still have scale and uptime issues - go figure) - so in today's fragmented online world, while we tend to spend our time in lots of different locations, we are in a better place then when we all just stayed in own corners of the web - we are meeting and interacting w/ many new folks and new points of view, so fragmented yes, but positively so...
so what's missing most in this fragmented world is a common profiling
function, its totally ridiculous and redundant to have to re-enter all
of our personal & social info at every site where we want to
participate: name, location, blog address, email address, favorite
books, movies, music, food, sports, hobbies, etc... - all this info
should be in one location, created, managed and owned by me, accessible
to any social tool/site i authorize can have access to it - seems
simple enough to me ;)
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