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Social networking and keeping it all straight

October 10th, 2007 Jason Posted in geek, social networking | No Comments »

Like almost everyone I know, I have accounts all over the internet at various ’social networking’ sites: Livejournal, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and so on, some of which I use more than others.

I’ve also got the standard assortment of email accounts at Yahoo!, Gmail, and MSN, which also get used as logins for various other places like Google Reader, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, and on top of that, as I’m doing research for things at work I’ll end up with more logins for more sites, and a lengthy list of sites to try and keep up with.

How the heck do I keep all this stuff straight?

It’s mighty helpful that browsers will remember passwords, I’ll say that. And I have a small stock of regular usernames and passwords I use, so if I haven’t saved the login for a particular site, there’s decent odds I can come up with it from memory.

I also have a private wiki set up for tracking my daily tasks and some other information, so I’ve got a page there with a table of account info.

But keeping up with all the various sites on a day-to-day basis, particularly the networking sites, is a little more tricky.

Google Reader gets a lot of use for keeping up on a load of invdividual blogs all at once. Livejournal has customizable reading groups, so I can hit one page and see the latest posts from a filtered list of my entire network. Most of the sites have some little alertbox or email functionality. But I’ve realized that what I really want is a way to hit a variety of my sites from the same place in a single go, with a minimum of effort. I want a social network aggregator.

Conceptually, the new personalized portal sites like iGoogle and My Yahoo! could do this via gadgets or whatever, but what I’ve seen thus far is at best clunky and at worst would involve building my own custom widgets. Too much work!

Last week I came upon 8hands, which apparently accesses a variety of different social networks all at once. I thought, “Hey! Perfect!” But then I realized it is an installed application and not a web-based service. I can’t for the life of me understand the benefit of this. Not Perfect!

So I started digging around, and came across a really useful article on mashable about social media aggregators. Seems like I am not alone in realizing this would be handy, and it appears to be quite the developing wave in this whole Web 2.0 thing.

So far I have checked out several of the options, and haven’t found a clear winner yet.

Spokeo has a great interface and is pretty easy to use, but I don’t like how it doesn’t allow you to actually interact with the different sites. It is essentially a feed reader of my contact’s activity. Close, but no cigar.

MyLifeBrand seems promising, but if I’m required to acknowledge reading and understanding the TOS, I’m waiting until it’s not a blank page.

Most of the list appear to be more about controlling profiles and assembling links to the various other sites, and most seem to suffer from a lack of interactivity with the source sites. Not so useful, really.

The most promising of the bunch seems to be the as-yet-unrealized SocialStream project, which appears to consolidate all of your online networks into and lets you to post, read, respond, and connect with new people, all in a single online interface.

I am waiting.