Where are our standards for entering social network information?
A bunch of individual things culminate into this post. First, I recently had to find a new job. That sucked. For real. I’m 34, I’ve got two small kids, and suddenly I’m wondering how much longer I can keep a roof over their head and feed them good, nutritious food. But now I’m negotiating contracts for a software/EDI/networking company. It’s my first time in this industry so I’m learning a lot about standards and how software really makes communication within and between businesses more efficient. Material that is alternatively completely fascinating and excruciatingly boring.
I also realized going through this process that I have been doing shit for real, productive networking. I was scrambling to get back in touch with lost friends and business associates and acquaintances. I don’t know to what extent it would have helped, maybe a lot, maybe not at all, but I am committed in my new job to better build and maintain both my social and professional network.
If you’ve read this far I really feel sorry for you that you have nothing better to read anywhere on the Internet, but here is where it ties together–I’m suddenly getting really, really tired of entering all my data everywhere on the Internet. Contacts are scattered throughout different networks–Plaxo, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, a half-dozen different IM programs, and for each one I’m entering and re-entering the same or similar information. It’s ridiculous! Am I a human data-entry machine? Am I just an old curmudgeon destined to be left behind in the online networking revolution?
My one great thought now that I am hip-deep in the networking environment is that some meta-group of developers and programmers should get together and decide on some rudimentary standards for social and professional network data. Make it so that migrating data from one networking service to another . . . obviously it won’t be painless because LinkedIn doesn’t care what movie I saw last and Facebook doesn’t (much) care what I thought of the work performed by current and former colleagues. But my background, education, a lot of my personal information–it would be a significant time saver if these pieces of data could have universal tags that I could import and export from one service to another.
Take the various new online calendar programs. I finally took the plunge and started to get to know Google calendar. I figured that Google is a big enough name that I’m not going to try to log in to some small calendar program site one day only to find that they’ve closed up shop and all my work is vanished in a poof of smoke. There are also tools for synching Google to Outlook, so that’s a nice feature. Now I’m reading from guys like Scoble how awesome some Facebook calendar app is and I’m thinking–”Crap, I just entered Auntie Doug’s birthday along with 100 other relatives into Google calendar, now I’m going to re-enter all that? No f-ing way.” End of story.
It would be like EDI standards, and I’m assuming if you can get some of the best and brightest from the Web 2.0 movement together and by some miracle get them moving on the same page, well, maybe something could be accomplished. Who knows. But think of all the potential applications (or see, for example, my last blog post about online finance programs) . . . how many times you’ve entered data about yourself all over the Internet for different services. I can see elements of this being discussed in various places, but networking is such a jumble these days . . . and hell, I’m a journalism major who went into law, I’m so far out of my depth I can’t even see sunlight. I’m just voicing my opinion as a consumer–if you want my future patronage at a new networking service, you’re going to have to make it easier for me than it’s been so far. This has been ridunkulous.
And maybe all I’m thinking of is a more robust OpenID program; you’ve got to start somewhere. But I can tell you this–the “next big thing” in social networking is going to have to have something like this to draw users away from their existing networks, and new networking programs and services are going to start facing greater startup obstacles because people are going to be so entrenched in their existing networks that switching over is just going to be too much work. Maybe it’s already too late for new services such as Pownce, we’ll see, but the consolidation and semi-solidification of the market is going to have to happen at some point. That’s my prediction. Go market forces! Bring your bounty of efficiency upon this mess!
Holy crap I hope you’re reading this because you skipped to the end after the first paragraph.
