FLIRTing with the Crowds

I am. With the torrent of social media networks available, the incentive to sign up for yet another service that would bring you tons of new friends and make your life a constant bliss (should you ever log in again after registering) is slowly wearing out.

That doesn’t mean thinking that I already have too many contacts and would be totally happy with my existing buddies. Not even close. Just today I engaged in a very useful and enjoyable e-mail exchange with Mr. Langenberg, who is the author of an article that comes very close to my thesis subject. After inquiring for the working paper, I got a lightning fast response from him, and after explaining my thesis subject in a bit more detail, he was kind enough to share with me a collection of additional readings he thought might be useful for my studies. Most of the articles seem very promising and I doubt I would ever have found them just by soloing through our school’s journal search tools.

Yesterday I didn’t even know the guy. Today he had personally helped me a great deal with his advice and we had developed a mutual interest for each other’s research fields. That’s social networking at its best.

But to the point. The thing I was talking about at the start of this post is the endless cycle of identical processes that I have to go through every time I register for a service: pour out all the information about myself from my first kiss through my favorite bands to whether or not I believe in the existence of extraterrestrial beings. Then I need to pinpoint all the locations I have visited in the world and upload all my pictures from along the way. This all takes enormous amounts of time, wastes bandwidth and feels frustrating, and I’m not even a member in that many networks. The same is true with instant messaging: ICQ, yahoo, Skype, MSN, etc. In order to stay in touch with all of my buddies from different countries & continents, I would have to keep all of these on at all times. Again, a waste of resources and attention.

It isn’t any better with applying for jobs either. Actually, it’s worse. For every employer, I have to use their own unique web form for entering all my previous employers, titles, descriptions of responsibilities, education, language skills, etc. And not I only have to do it once for every employer, but once for every post I’m applying to. If I’m applying for three jobs at the same company, at worst I have to fill out the exact same forms three times within one session in front of my computer! This is not always the case, of course, but surprisingly many big and supposedly up-to-date companies have this kind of against-all-logic system currently in use.

The thing we need is services that can mash up data and user information from various different sources and be controlled by a universal user account. Service providers need to recognize this need and open their interfaces for data transfer between services. When I for example sign up for a new social network, I want to import my photos from flickr, my destinations from ballofdirt.com as well as my work experience from LinkedIn and my link feed from del.icio.us. Otherwise it will eventually be impossible for me to add up on new services and the limit of how many networks I can participate is reached pretty quickly.

Jon Udell noted the same phenomenon in his article on social network fatigue when quoting Gary McGraw: “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet”.

Could it be that some day the only network we need to register to is the web, and all our information will be there to use in all the different contexts we may come up with, with only one upload. Perhaps, but, as it seems now, not too soon.