Building Social Networks - don't we have enough of them yet? Apparently not. Through last year a couple of new Social Networks were being released every week and it was suddenly in to build one around Corporate Brands. I also found a paper on building "smart communities" though weaving your network much as one would knit a scarf.
And there's' a forum on Community Building and Social Networks at Webmasterworld, a community I still belong to (but am no longer a subscriber - no time) with the focus of using Social Networks for Search Engine Optimization and and traffic generation - so now the SEO Community wants to hop onto the Social Network bandwagon too, using sites like Flickr and other Photo posting sites to just clutter up Search Results even more.
I found a post on Marketing Pilgrim about the fatigue of having too many Social Networks and the effort to keep your membership up in more and more of them.
"…Everyday there seems to be some sort of new social network to connect some niche vertical, today it was the baking network, tomorrow who knows? And really at this point who cares? I feel like I know what all my friends, relatives, and even casual acquaintances are doing twenty four seven and clearly they seem to have a pretty good idea what I am up to too.
Is it time to unplug and take a step back away from the social networking world and get back to direct personal communication? While social networks have their positives there seems to be an ever growing exhaustion with the time and effort it takes to maintain them and in the end that maybe the real danger. If the space becomes to full of networks and begins to turn off and wear out its members the space may eventually end up cannibalizing itself. "
On the other hand, it's becoming harder to have face to face personal communications as so much of our work involves being on computers all day! It's hard to imagine what it would be like if we had to go back to communicating but just talking to people.
Some way to connect up all the Social Networks so every time you join a new one, it pulls all the information from your other social networks and keeps all of them up to date. Right now, there is no "Universal Remote" for Social Networks - no universal interface though I know of some attempts to create Social Network Services that link up the most popular Social Networks and yet when I search about it in Google - all I get are more Social Networks to join!
Maybe that's enough about Social Networks for one post!
