No More Social Networks, Please

Lost track of all the social networks you’ve signed up for? Join the club. [Or better yet, don't. If you've lost track, you're in too many clubs already.]

A handy tool called User Name Check scans over 60 social web platforms for your name and then reports which of them you’ve joined. If you are a social web profligate, this will likely surface some half-forgotten memories. Um, Magnolia? Oh, right. Tumblr? D’oh!.

I think the tool is designed to help you discover whether someone else who goes by your online handle is already signed up for, say, Virb [a Twitter clone, I think. It was down when I checked]. Presumably if the name TweakyCheeky is still available, you can claim your digital grubstake. If someone out there is already using it. . .well, forewarned is forearmed.

But truth told, the real value of User Name Check for me was to illustrate with breathtaking clarity just how many redundant, useless and profoundly inane social platforms have been unloosed in the past year or so.

Oh, I know, I know: The tools of digital collaboration have become so inexpensive and simple that anybody with a two-year-old Dell and a broadband connection can establish a hub where thousands of kindred spirits can be kindred together. The earth is shrinking, cultures are merging and the human fabric is warping and woofing with every new keystroke. All of this is disrupting established institutions and driving a massive social transformation whose outlines we are only beginning to see.

But man, the sh*t-to-shinola ratio of the social web has really spiked while I wasn’t looking.

Could Kwippy make any meaningful improvement to your life?

Could Koornk?

Rejaw?

Go ahead, try User Name Check. Hey, if your name is available on Diigo, sign up. It’s a free. . .global information ecology, or whatever.

But I will save you one bit of trouble. I took a quick look, and I think I can guarantee you’d rather play the “disappearing pencil” game with the Joker than join the social network called iliketotallyloveit.

Once again, a tip o’ the fez to Very Short List, the daily e-mail newsletter which surfaces so much good stuff it’s getting embarrassing for the rest of us.

My Friends. . .I Apologize to You All

I’m killing time waiting for the final presidential “debate” [it's a joint televised appearance, not a debate, but let's save that for another day]. So I decided to goof around with yet another interactivedigitaldemocracydoodad.

I can’t be sure, but I think I just gave up all my friends in order to learn that I, like Barack Obama, am intellectual, aesthetic, and curious.

This is one of those pointless quizzes that demands you rate yourself on a handful of questions between two false extremes, tallies your claims and disgorges a simpleton analysis. Honey, I shrunk the Myers-Briggs.

But in my haste to do this, I clicked “Allow” on the following screen:

I know that even creating a profile on a social network is the first step to losing any pretense of control over my identity. But I think I just allowed this stupid application to suck in all my friends’ info and “other content” it requires to do its work. Maybe I’ve done this before. I really don’t know.

But the combination of the inanity of the application combined with what appears to be a full unconditional grant of my friends’ goodies is deeply annoying.

I have 180 friends–okay, “friends”–on Facebook. I think it’s too late to do anything about it.

To my friends, I apologize. Unfriend me if you will.

Luckily, from the information above, it looks like that’s unlikely to happen. My friends, I now know, are “understanding.”

GSP Liveblog: Graphing Social Patterns

I’m liveblogging from O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns, a social media conference. Try to contain yourselves, please.

5 Things that Win on Social Networks, from David McClure, 500 Hats: [Brackets show me talking, not speakers.]

1. Multiple Social Network Platforms. They are proliferating, as a big Venn diagram illustrates. [Note to self: For whom is this good?]

2. News Feeds let you stay in touch with multiple groups as networks proliferate

3. App-Vertising: Widgets, social apps are new methods that are not annoying to “reach” people. Said he, after misspeaking: “I probably shouldn’t say targeting” people. It’s “reaching people with information on products and services.”

4. Data Portability: Use social content on multiple platforms across web [No longer limited to single-platform interactions]

5. Social Commerce: It’s not happening yet, but “I’m predicting,” said he. The idea is that people will begin making purchases while doing their stuff on social networks. [We'll see.]