One of the problems with having more and more Social Networks is - each one you belong to would require some of your time and most of the work you put into one network you can't leverage into another. As time goes on, maybe that will change, but, now, it's not easy to find social networks someone might belong to, or at least by mentioned at.
And then…consider that people signup in many places using pseudonames - so unless you have way to map back a person's psuedoname to a real name- you'll miss many of the networks they might be a member of (under one or more pseudonames).
Certainly, that's Pseudoname issue solvable by searching first under an individuals name in order to match up any Pseudonames they might be using (IE: I signup in some places as Webmetricsguru, and at others as ArtNewYorkCity ….those names should be mapped to me - but I don't know that they are).
One way or the other - a way to search all these Social Networks is really needed now… and Streakr seems to do that - but not for all the networks - just a couple of the bigger ones like MySpace. I tried a search on networks for Amy Crehore - just to see if it would pick anything (there's nothing for me because I don't really join many social networks) - but I did find 2 listings for her - again, not that much …. but it's a beginning.
If I look for entries about people or organizations I know such as the Brooklyn Artists Gym - I can pick up a couple of pages - maybe I would have gotten the same pages from Google - but I would have gotten a lot more stuff that's not really Social Networks.
So right now you have Myspace, Bebo, Hi5 and Facebook - if we could add all the WikiPedia listed Social Networks, including Second Life and other 3D Worlds…and all the new stuff coming out every week - we'd have quite something… especially if it could somehow be mapped.
I'm not saying this is easy to do…it's not. But it's needed and I think someone will do this ….maybe the next Google.
