Social Deathworks

February 5th, 2008

I have recently come across the web services of hellotxt.com and am impressed with the idea. Hellotxt is a website that allows you to update several social networks at once including, twitter, jaiku, pownce, facebook, tumblr, beemood, and several foreign networks. The idea is you register for an account at hellotxt.com and let them know what profiles at these social networks you have and then you can update your status on them all at once. Sounds good, great even.

But then again, is the fact that this service exists just the presenting ailment to a much greater issue. This is most definitely a 1st world problem. Seriously how many social networks do we need to be apart of? I personally have lost count how many I’m a member of but it’s at least ten. You would assume that makes me a very social person and I have a lot of friends but in all reality, I’m not all that social and I don’t have a lot of friends.

I have friends and I love them all dearly but I don’t spend the quality time with them that I should. Has our love of “Social Networks” made us worse people? Have we forgotten what real friendship is like? Have we traded a clever 140 character message for a good cup of coffee and an honest 30 min conversation? I think we have. These social networks are easy to get excited about. The problem is that a new one pops up every week. What is the solution to our 1st world problem. Obviously hellotxt.com thinks they may have it, but really that’s just a undersized band-ade for a series gushing puncture wounds.

I don’t know enough about this stuff to solve the problem but I think I have a couple ideas that could help. Some of these are already being implement and it’s most likely just a matter of time until they are broadly accepted.

I’ll start by asking a few questions. Why do social networks exist? and How do they make money? Social networks exist because we want to interact with our “friends” at all times, on our own terms and where ever we want (I realize there are more reasons but these will suffice). Nothing wrong with that, I talk to friends all over the country that I haven’t seen in years and social networks make that possible. The second question is also easily answered: Advertising! Almost every social network has advertising and that is how they make there money. So as long as those two things are happening then a social network can survive and maybe even flourish. How does one go about choosing a social network? It’s the one your friends are using, but not all your friends are on the same one and so you must sign up for more and here we are in the cycle of social network collecting.

What if a open standard was used in social networking where everyone could communicate with everyone else? You could have friends from myspace in your facebook and your tumblr blog would show up in your friends pownce and so forth. You could pick any one of those social networks to be your home base and go from there. I want to be able to build my own site that is my destination on the web and have all my social network stuff right there at my finger tips. Like this site if I post a blog I want it to show up in myspace, facebook, twitter, pownce, you name it and anyone that wants to comment on the post doesn’t have to have 30 different logins for each service but they can comment where they receive the post and it is posted here as well. These companies can stick advertising where ever as they do now and we would be closer to solving this stupid 1st world problem we’ve created.

Those are my thoughts. What are yours? Let me know in the comments.

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