WebCrush.Blog

No political message here, but I’m just wondering about the viability of all these newly popular social network websites and technologies that are sprouting up all over.  Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc.  How many do we need, and how different are they really?

I find it interesting how similar this is to the instant messenger boom seen 7-8 years ago.  We started out with two major players–AIM and ICQ, but that quickly spread to MSN, Yahoo, Google and so on.  Everybody had accounts with each of them, sometimes multiples of them.  Each provider was vying for your eyeballs and wanted to be the messaging standard.  Coordinating them all was a pain, synching up contacts across them was a nightmare.  People pushed for open environments and APIs and what did we get?  Additional IM clients that suported numerous protocols–like Trillian.

The instant messenging bubble has come and gone, only to be replaced by these social network sites.  Many are quite similar, focused on allowing groups of ‘friends’ to follow each other, post updates as to what they are currently doing, share pictures, and essentially socialize.   Have we simply replaced instant messnegers with social sites (which provide messenging as well, ironically)?  Does anyone see the trend how we are repeating the situation all over again–companies fighting for your attention, all wanting to be the standard, and no interoperability between them?

Again we see third parties, like Digsby,  come along and provide so-called mashups pulling and pushing data from various sources into one medium.

How long until this fad dies out and we get to start over again?  Maybe we’ll get it right for once.