Social Network Fatigue Coming?

mrspin offers the opinion of ZDNet blogger Steve O'Hear that users may soon tire of social networks — if they don't open up and embrace standards allowing greater interoperability among the different networks. O'Hear writes: "Unless the time required to sign-in, post to, and maintain profiles across each network is reduced, it will be impossible for most users to participate in multiple sites for very long." In an earlier post he went into more detail on the same subject, with extensive opinions from four creators of social networks. A contrary data point comes from the Apophenia blog, in a post noting the tendency among young users to create ephemeral profiles, and not to mind at all if they have to re-enter data. "Teens are not looking for universal anything; that's far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm." What does Slashdot think — is data portability among social networking sites a big deal or not?

Use a common portal then...

[vistic]

There are efforts [optrata.com] being made to consolidate all these social network sites into one, common portal like Optrata (one page to rule them all).

That may be the key for now, because I doubt any "standard" will develop among different social network sites. (I sure can't imagine how myspace, youtube, facebook, livejournal, orkut, etc. would agree on a standard: they all have their own approaches and problems. Myspace would demand every 1/3 request goes to a "under maintenance" page, still filled with a hundred ads and flash videos and other flash apps to crash your browser... and Orkut would demand every 2/3 requests is a server hiccup.)

To The Contrary

[FreeRadicalX]

To quite the contrary, in an era of online big-brother government snooping, I'd actually prefer that my social networking data be as un-portable as possible, thankyouverymuch. *breaks out roll of tinfoil, begins folding*

anti-social network coming

[Anonymous Coward]

The title should have been. Check out my profile, just search for anonymous coward.

Re:IT'S ALL TRUE!

[Kris_J]

I'm even sick of posting journal entries!

Your entries have been popping up in the Firehose, and I'm sick of them too.

It's all about sex

[goombah99]

Social Networking is all about sex and status. As long as it can achieve more of those for the user or at least the user can be persuaded of that then the burden is not too much until an easier route appears. If the chicks leave the guys will leave too. If they stay, then the guys will stay too. It's that simple.

The burnout is just another way of saying it's not worth the effort for the return on the sex.

Re:Relevancy

[ScrewMaster]

Well, some years ago I used Classmates to find a girl I used to know back in high school (it was three decades ago but what the hell.) Turns out she's still hot and actually available after all these years. Unfortunately I wasn't (hot or available) so I don't know why I bothered in the first place.

So, yeah, okay. Ten points to Gothmolly.

Unable to reply

[OldManAndTheC++]

Too fatigued...

Re:A couple thoughts...

[Anonymous Coward]

universal client that will be able to interface with all the networks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser [wikipedia.org]

Pretty cutting-edge stuff...