Which You Is Where? A Social Network Problem.

I’ve always had one major complaint about social networks: They’ve created multiple Ryans, and I sometimes lose track of which Me is Me when it comes to certain sites.

When I first started using sites like Facebook or MySpace I was only friends with my real life friends and there were no problems. I could post pictures of parties and concerts and other places that people in their mid to late twenties go without worrying about any repercussions. I didn’t have to worry about what pictures I uploaded, what I said about people’s pictures, or what I bitched about on my blog. I was even able to tell the punchline to dirty jokes like “why doesn’t Barbie have any kids?”

Today though, I can’t do that.

Over time I saw my MySpace and Facebook profiles grow from just my friends to include family, co-workers, family of friends, other businesses, and even clients from work.

After all, you can’t deny a friend request from a client when you’re still hoping they’re going to sign a huge deal right?

Now, my accounts are all polluted. I stopped being Ryan and started turning my social network pages into corporate web pages. They’ve all become Ryan the professional, and I think that’s what will inevitably kill off social networks.

I’m noticing the same trend with lots of my friends – both real friends and MySpace friends.

Those who aren’t making their profiles more professional are going to soon regret it. I still see profiles of high school teachers that include pictures of them in their underwear, but for the most part people are learning not to do this anymore.

In fact, we recognized very early into identity.net that there was a strong need for users to have “multiple me’s.” The “me” I linked from my company web page was different from the “me” at this blog, which had nothing in common with the “me” that you see at the bar on Friday nights listening to country music bands.

That problem is still facing all of today’s social networking sites. Creating several MySpace accounts is a pain, and the Lori Drew case has shown us that creating one under a “nickname” so that it can’t be found could be cause for the FBI to come knocking at my door. I certainly don’t want that, so my only current choice is to not post the fun pictures, jokes, and blog entries that I’d like to share with my friends.

That solution is also “no bueno.”

Most teens (as I observed my 17 year old cousin here in Dallas do) just move from one platform to another. They started on friendster, moved to MySpace, and are now all over Facebook. When I ask why, it’s always a reason that has to do with having too many mixed friends on one of the sites.

But they can’t site hop forever, and they’re running out of alternatives. It’s only a matter of time until the next MySpace or Facebook “killer” comes along, but will it suffer from the same problems too? And when it does come along, which “me” will I create an account with?

For that matter, which “me” is really “me?”

2 comments December 29th, 2008

The Next Things To Collapse

I was talking with Jeff from hockeynews.net the other day and he brought up an interesting statistic. Compared to other countries, the US has 6X more retail store front per capita than anybody else.

We’ve spent the last decade putting a starbucks on every corner, and nobody’s realized that we have way more retail stores and fast food places than we need. It makes sense too. I have 3 McDonalds within a 1/4 mile of my house and 2 Marathon gas stations on my corner. There’s 2 Gamestops within a mile of me too.

There’s simply not that much demand anymore. With the economy strong and mortgages easy to get, we not only bought houses we couldn’t afford but we started up a whole bunch of redundant businesses too and crammed them into places where they shouldn’t be.

The retail industry is going to fail too, but it won’t be next. There’s a few others going to collapse.

The final nail in the auto industry’s coffin was when the banks failed. That’s why you see the big3 eliminating financing and leasing.

That leads me to believe that credit cards will be the next to fail. As more Americans get laid off they’ll start putting more and more on their credit cards. It won’t be long before they let the credit card bill go into the trash can with their mortgage payment.

When that happens, the retail stores are going to take a big huge hit.

Lots of markets need to be corrected, and it’s going to be an ugly road out of this recession – we’re still on the downslope.

December 19th, 2008

Who Supports hCard? Anyone? Bueller?

Update: I’ve done a followup to this post titled: the future of microformats.

I wrote a while ago about openID and how companies want to say they support it without supporting it. It seems that the same thing is happening with lots of other formats. One in particular is hCard.

There’s tons of sites out there that “support” hCard. By support, I mean that they publish an hCard for you of your data. In theory, this will allow you to take your data with you anywhere you want. If I want to leave MyBlogLog, or Twitter, or Flickr, I can simply take my hCard to another site and create an account there with all of that information. In a more quixotic use, you could even just update one account and the others would pull in that hCard at set intervals. It all works well in theory. In theory though, communism is a great system. In the real world, it doesn’t work. Neither does hCard – yet.

The problem with hCard is the same problem with openID – everybody wants to be a provider, but nobody accepts it. As of this blog post I’ve found a total of 2 websites that allow me to create an account with my hCard. Bragster and getSatisfaction – and even those are somewhat buggy and don’t pull in all the fields that they possibly could. Where are the Google, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo offerings that will let me import an hCard. What about MySpace and Facebook?

hCards are very easy to deal with, so who’s going to step up to the plate here and start accepting hCards?

1 comment December 17th, 2008