Social overload

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, Plurk, the list goes on. It goes on a very long way!

As someone who looks upon these things with both a personal and professional interest, where do you start, and more importantly, where do you stop?

For me, I mainly use Twitter, Facebook is a secondary concern for me. I don’t post updates regularly, but I use it for the esoteric comments that wouldn’t fit in with the statements and banter I get on Twitter. I think most people use a very small subset of tools of those available for their social media needs.

Now Google is making waves with Google Wave (see what I did there?), which will combine IM, Email, and collaborative working to a certain extent but have they missed the boat?

Hardly anyone I know use email for much nowadays. It’s become a medium to share a private comment, photo, joke etc that they don’t post in public. Everyone I know who communicates online does so via Facebook, Twitter, or IM. Even getting people to move from MSN/WLM to Google Talk was impossible, so will people make the move to this new tool, there are already too many ways of communicating.

I know I will use Google Wave. It’s new, I will have to use it as I can’t resist the lure of playing with new tools. The problem I will face is finding people to make use of it with. If it’s “what email would be like if it was invented today”, then why not make it part of Gmail? Why make a new tool? C’mon Google, you have so many applications now, many of them could be integrated into one solution. iGoogle, Reader, Talk, Gmail, Calendar, Documents, Contacts, and many more, I would be happy to have these all on one dashboard app, it would be easier to see what I had, what I was sharing, my contacts etc. Is this where Wave is headed? Who knows?

Can we have some consolidation? Microsoft and Yahoo merged IM networks so that people could chat to each other, why can’t we have some more open standards and get people on Facebook chatting to people on Windows Live Messenger/Yahoo/MySpace/ICQ and so on. Yes, I know you can use clients such as Digsby, but that still requires an account on each, and you couldn’t have a conference chat between people on other networks.

While it’s good to have choice, and competition, there’s simply too much out there now, so what incentives are there for the average Joe to try something new, and persuade all of his friends to join in?

I agree that some communities benefit from having their own thing, something that caters for them more than another solution, but I have been part of these smaller groups, and they tend to stagnate faster, and become more cliquey, therefore alienating anyone else who wants to join very quickly.

Perhaps instead of spending so much time and resource in developing new social networks, we should find out how to make best use of the tools we already have, and improve upon them.