Vanessa Fox. Nude.

Earlier I ranted about how there are all these social networking sites and they bring us together and are great and joyous and we are all on a mountain top, holding hands, singing songs, and buying each other cokes, except that we are all on different mountains and every three minutes, we have to switch mountains to leave a new status message and by the time we’re done climbing and running around and setting things up just right on every mountain top we can find, our coke is warm and who wants warm coke.

Both in the comments and on twitter, people suggested various solutions for more easily stalking and being stalked, so I started checking them out. Then, I dug around and found more solutions, but none that really did what I was looking for. There are services where you can have a consolidated place for all of your profiles, but I can do that myself. And in fact, these consolidation services let you enter profile details, pictures, and all kinds of other things, so they end up being another social networking service to keep track of! It’s like they act like they are this fantastical magical answer, but in fact, are secretly adding to my coke-drinking, song-teaching, hand-holding dilemma. It’s like being rewarded for peeling a pile of potatoes… with more potatoes. Not that I don’t love me some potatoes, but sometimes, I’d like to stop peeling and eat them already.

First, I should mention that I’m not exactly a social networking butterfly. I don’t have a MySpace account (I mean, actually, I might. I vaguely recalling getting one as to grab the username. But I don’t think I could log in now even if I tried.). I may have a Friendster account, possibly. Not sure. I do have a Facebook account, but I’m so lame there, I can’t even update my status message more than once every two weeks. I do upload pictures to Flickr, but I forget that people can comment and I can’t really figure out how to see if anyone has commented, so I tend to happen upon a question about one of my pictures like a month after someone posts it. Really slick social networking there, huh.

I also have a Linkedin account that I’ve had forever. I never go there, but I was scrolling through it when looking into this social networking stuff. I am convinced that every single person in the world has a Linkedin account. Go ahead. Type in someone’s name. Anyone’s. Or try this. Fill out your profile with your previous jobs and where you went to school and then click on the tiniest, most obscure company you’ve ever worked for. Every single person you work with will be listed. It’s freaky, really. I was talking to someone the other day who said that they were on Linkedin all the time and I said, doing what? And I guess that’s why I’m so bad at these sites. I don’t know exactly what you do there, but apparently you network. Like you might at a cocktail party only you can do it from your couch with your laptop while you watch Buffy DVDs. And you have to mix your own drinks. So, as with everything, there are pros and cons.

As you can see by my sidebar, I have been trying Twitter, and I actually kind of like it because I have a mix of friends that I can keep up with and I can do short little microblogging. Except again, I don’t really update very often. And I don’t really do instant messaging, so I have to go to the website to see everyone’s updates. Which makes it less useful than it could be, I suppose, especially when the website mostly shows the cat with the screwdriver when I know for a fact that cats refuse to do even the easiest of hardware maintenance requests. They will type for you though.

I do have a Digg profile, but does that really count as social networking? I mean, I guess you can see what stories your friends think are interesting and you can check them out too, so it’s a bit like sharing and being social. I have tried to set up del.icio.us, but I’m just not quite that organized yet. It’s on the list though. Right after I read that Getting Things Done book.

As an experiment, I tried a few of these purported magical consolidation sites. How did it go? Well…

SocialURL
Connect all of your social networks with one URL. Sounds fantastic right? Well, it let me enter the URLs of my profiles on the various social networking sites. Although, as I mentioned before, I could set up a page of links myself. I entered my Flickr information, but it didn’t seem to do anything with that. Then came cause for alarm. It prompted me to create a photo album. But I already have a photo album on Flickr! I’m here to consolidate stuff, not create new stuff! I can also write post-it notes to myself, which is OK I guess. But somewhat random. I can see who’s viewed my (non-existent) profile, which is, well, kind of creepy I suppose. I can also leave messages for people, which means that in addition to my email, and other email, and oh right that other email, plus Facebook, those hard-to-find Flickr comments, twitters, and blog comments, I need to remember to come over here to see what people are saying. Also, even with a non-existent profile, I’ve started getting requests for friends.

It’s not bad, as far as consolidation goes. They gave me a badge I can put on my site, like this:

Get your own social badge

You can do things like browse the “popular” people, who look exactly as you might imagine.

Jaiku
This seems to be not unlike Twitter, except that you can also add a bunch of feeds to your profile. You can list as many feeds as you’ve got. And then you can get a badge like this, so someone can go see your list of feeds and our mini blogging entries. I think.

It is kind of cool how it (I think) shows a combined feed of everything, but of course, it requires that everything you do has feeds, and I’m not sure if that’s the case. Digg and Twitter both seem to have one though, so maybe it’s just a matter of doing a little investigation and experimentation. (It couldn’t find the feed of my blog until I gave it the Feedburner URL, for instance.)

claimID
This somehow uses OpenID. It also claims to help you rank more highly for your name in search engines, although I’m not sure how that works. It looks like this is another system of compiling all of your identities. But you just add links and descriptions and things manually. I didn’t have the energy to do this. I guess I can do other things like add a contact network and I’m supposed to mark up my contacts with XFN data. Now, I pride myself on being a geek, but XFN data? Apparently, on my blogroll, I can add a rel attribute to the links that specify how I know the blogger. Looking at the documentation, I see that an acquaintance is someone I’ve perhaps exchanged a short conversation or two. Anything more makes that person my friend. I must have a lot of friends. Although a friend is also described as a home (boy|girl) and I didn’t know I was hip enough to have any of those, so maybe I have no friends at all. I can describe someone as my muse, which is awesome. But apparently that has no inverse. And with someone you call a crush, no symmetric relationship is offered as a possibility. Which makes the whole XFN thing somewhat like a sad Shakespearean tragedy, with unrequited love and lonely muses.

“Wilt thou be gone home boy? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale and not the lark,
That pierced the fateful hollow of thine inspiring muse-like ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree, which is not yet a geographic location attribute but hopefully will be soon:
Believe me XFN crush, it was the nightingale.

It was the lark, oh you with the non-symmetrical crush, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, acquaintance with whom I have exchanged only a short conversation or two, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder geographic location of which we do not share an adjacent doorway.

My point is just that claimID seems to be a hell of a lot of work. And I’m pretty lazy, which I describe when trying to make a good impression as “busy”.

Cluztr
Somewhat like del.icio.us except that it just keeps track of every web site you surf to so your friends can see your online path. Um, no thanks. I like to keep my porn surfing to myself.

Wink
You can search for your name and find the profiles that are yours and claim them. It found my Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Everything else was MySpace accounts for 15 year old girls. Who knew? You can also then add all the profiles Wink didn’t find. I admit, I’m getting a little tired at this point. Especially as most of these services aren’t accepting my profile pictures very easily. And Wink never sent my verification email. And I couldn’t figure out how to edit something if I entered the URL incorrectly. So, I would have to just delete it and start over. It’s also a little unsettling that you have to provide your username and password for each service to claim it and it’s unclear if it’s gathering the information or just passing it through to the service. In any case, Wink gave me a widget for my blog that looks like this:

ProfileLinker
This service links all your profiles. Are you beginning to sense a pattern? It also lets me upload a photo album and set status information, so as with several of the other services, it starts to compound my problem, rather than solve it. This site also lets you add password information for your various services, which will give you extra features from those services. This site has nice embedded help that shows up when you click into a field. You can also create a portable profile, and I’m not quite sure what that means except that it made me a freaky widget that rotates with pictures of people like Rand Fishkin (don’t worry Geraldine! It was this profilelinker service! I’m not keeping pictures of your fiance!) and Mike McDonald. My module looks like this:

There are surely lots of other social networking aggregation services out there. It seems that if what you want to do is have a widget that displays all your network links on your blog, many of these would do fine. If you want to use one of these services as a social networking service, well, you can, but you have more cokes to hand out and songs to sing than I do. And if you’re looking for the fulfillment of my impossible dream, and using one service to push and pull all status information, friends feeds, photo albums into a single gallery, and hope and joy and requited love for all, well, I haven’t found that yet. But I’ll let you know when I do.