In a recent post entitled “Timformation Overload” I lamented the being ‘attacked’ electronically from all angles. One part of the solution would be a single login for of all my social networking accounts – MySpace, WAYN, Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, Twitter and Friendster.
I am convinced that most of the people I know would love to see this happen – log into one site and get the best of all of them. Now, most of these services are owned by competing enterprises, so I can’t see them being the driver toward an amalgamated account, but as is often the case, when consumer demand is not met due to a corporate closed-shop, open source may be the answer.
What I am describing here is not so much the amalgamation of social networking sites, but instead, platform neutrality – that is, your data – photos, video, audio, text – is your own and can be syndicated across your various social networking sites and beyond – including your blog.
I haven’t found any Open Source projects that aim to achieve data independence and platform neutrality, but if you know of any, please post a comment – I’d love to see what’s going on regarding this.
Check out 8hands. It’s a profile aggregator that unifies all your data into a desktop tool. It also aggregates media from all different social networks and you can follow blog comments and everything.
Thanks for the link, Johnny – unfortunately the software is not web-based but instead requires Windows… I’m on a Macintosh, so I guess I’ll have to wait for the Mac version before I check it out.
[…] blogged at my own site about my desire to see social networking “platform neutrality” and Google’s OpenSocial represents an industry heavyweight steering social networking […]
[…] blogged here about “platform neutrality” – the idea that your profile and relationship/friendship/collegue/classmate information should […]