Social Networking is Too Complicated

This image is the crazy world of the serious social networker. Maintaining all of these different sites is very difficult. Each service has its own unique interface and set of programming links to each other. For the average user, it is really a very difficult and almost insurmountable issue to try to be sociable and involved while maintaining all of these different systems. And it just keeps becoming more and more complex.

If you are Power Social Networker, you are navigating a myriad of websites, user interfaces in order to keep your community up-to-date. And now, there is Google’s Buzz.

Following the logic of what many have become accustomed to dealing with, we find that Twitter has become the primary mechanism for the distribution of social networking messages to all of the other social networking systems. Unfortunately, Twitter only allows for 140 characters and it is prone to disabling crashes due to heavy loads.

There are other options. Look into ping.fm and tweetdeck.com as a way to multicast to both Twitter and FaceBook.  Maybe someday Twitter will feed from my blog and update Facebook and LinkedIn. For now, another alternative is Google’s Feedburner. It has a Feed Socialize feature that includes URL shortening so that blog post titles and links can be inserted into your Twitter input stream.

Then there is the issue of the dreaded typo that goes out from one system and gets fed into multiple other social networks. Mistakes go echoing throughout the sociosphere. So, be careful and be prepared to race to your other social sites to delete the bad entries. Social networking is complicated and still in its infancy. Ideally, someday, a vendor will create a unified system that will update all of the social networks and allow for editing of entries after they have already been posted.

Until then, being Social on the web is going to feel very anti-social.