Hello my name is Clayton and I’m an addict. I can’t stop signing up for social networks. It seems like everyday a new web service or social network is launched and I feel the need to join. Why? Don’t know but I think it some kind of sickness.

I don’t use most of the things I join and those I do use I don’t do anything important. They all seem to become time sinks. After much discussion with my wife I’ve decided to try a new approach to using my time. Why spend tons of time conversing with people I’ll never meet when I have real live friends right here that I could spend more time with? So that’s what I’m going to do. Here is a list of the services that are being cut from my life:

Twitter
Vimeo
Britekite
Several Podcasts
Ustream
Stickam
virb
friend feed

I will be keeping:

Pownce (micro blogging/friends)
Flickr (photo sharing)
Facebook (social network)
iLike (music network)

I don’t know why anyone needs all of those services but we gather them up like they are going out of style. For me I think I had this desire for my 10 minutes of fame. I know I’m never going to be a movie or tv star so I gave being a Internet Superstar a shot but really I didn’t try very hard and I’ve discovered that it requires more time than I am willing to invest. Coming out of this journey I realize how really stupid it all is. We get more and more “conveniences” in our lives but we never have more time. It feels good to know what’s going on in “The Tubes” but I sure don’t need hands on experience with everything out there. So I’m making a change toward simplicity, and I know I’ve tried this before but as I keep coming back to this conclusion it must be the right one.

Here are a couple of projects working on some of the issues brought up in my previous post on social networks.

Googles Open Social

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

In order for developers to get started immediately, Orkut has opened a limited sandbox that you can use to start building apps using the OpenSocial APIs.

Data Portability

As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

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.

Me.dium is a new way to browse the web. This is a website/service and a Firefox/Flock extension. What Me.dium does is gives you a visual representation of your web browsing and if you have friends that are also on Me.dium you can follow each other around the web and surf together. I just found it today and I haven’t spent too much time with it but I could see it being fun. The web has become such a vital and integral part of how we find information and entertainment. This tool helps in finding similar information to what we are looking for and makes it easy to share this information with your friends. This all via a built in chat client… this could be very fun for example while browsing blogs, Digg, or YouTube and sharing the cool stuff you find in real time with your friends.

You can also use this to see other Me.dium users that are browsing the same page as you are. I’m sure there are many more uses than I can see so far but it does look interesting. Check it out and if you sign up (it’s free like all good web 2.0) add me and we can try this thing out.

start here http://me.dum.com/about for more information.

Blogged with Flock

So…. I’ve been doing just fine without twitter for about a month but this last week I’ve just had a need to post short little word vomit phrases and no real outlet for that. I have started twittering again starting today. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/Clayton_B