I’ve been playing with Ping.Fm and going to be using it to update all the social networks I’m part of. Turns out there are 16 social networks that I’ll be updating when I send something to Ping. Yup, I have an account on 16 different network, and that’s not a complete list, as I can list a bunch of social bookmarking sites I have accounts on that aren’t on the list.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe this fragmentation is useful as the real power of social network centers around the people you interact with, and interacting with a few people in each network really doesn’t do much good. For example, I signed up on Pownce, but there aren’t too many people there I interact with, so it fell by the wayside. Again, I also joined Brightkite, but still haven’t had any traction there. Well, now I can just Ping and all my networks get a notification. Twitter is still my main way of finding out what’s going on in the world though.

I keep thinking about getting rid of some of the sites I am part of…I mean, how many can I really be useful on at once? What is my purpose for being there? Why do I feel the need to be everywhere at one time? I got rid of my Pownce account, but Twitter sticks as do so many other sites that I am on. I would love to erase myspace, but there are too many connections there. You know? Sometimes you just want to be ONE and not leaving a sliver of yourself all over the net.
I admit I have a thing for having an account at all the social networks I’m aware of, but Twitter is my one true love. 🙂
Social network sites can be great but I am reluctant to invest too much time in updating content only inside a network. I will use them but prefer to keep most of my content where I control it. See a list of John Hunter’s social sites.
Some of mine are listed on my About page. It’s part of this theme 😉