Taming the Social Networking Beast

I used to have quite the love/hate relationship with talking about myself on the internet. Back in the pre-Web 2.0 days I blogged here at this URL but shut it down after getting sick of finding things to put out there that overlapped on the venn diagram of topics “interesting to my friends” and “not telling the rest of the world as a whole about all my horrible secrets and fetishes” like the thing with the teapots, cream cheese, and mallards.

The Landscape

With the rise of the social web, I find that my blog is now my broadcast and the 2.0 social sites (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc) are my narrowcast where I both chat about the small stuff but also the personal stuff to a select group of friends. The options for social networking are pretty bewildering these days with no one site or tool doing everything you need or want it to do, and so some of your friends are probably using different services than you are.

When instant messaging took off and ICQ was joined by AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Jabber (and others later), it became a giant pain in the ass to keep all your friends and contacts within reach. You ended up running multiple IM apps or losing contact with friends on different services. Then applications like Adium and Trillian came along, allowing you to run all these services under one app and have all your friends under one IM roof.

The same thing is happening right now with social networking. You might have a Facebook profile, microblog on Twitter, and share links on del.icio.us. Your best friend is on MySpace (ditch him!), has a Tumblr page, and uses Google Reader to share choice links. You wouldn’t mind keeping in touch with him but the thought of adding another three sites to your rounds doesn’t sit well. There’s a crop of new sites that are attempting to make all this easier much in the same way Adium and Trillian did with IM.

The movement is young, and it’s rough around the edges, but it is definitely worth exploring the options if you want to keep in touch and share things with all your friends (and maybe find some new ones). I’m an early adopter but I live with someone who isn’t so I try to stay mum until there’s something truly useful and easy to use. I think we’re almost there with some services that try to make sense of the social networking scene out there.

The Contenders

Currently, the two big social network aggregators out there are SocialThing and FriendFeed. At first glance, they seem to be doing the same thing but there are some very important differences in their approaches and at the moment, they serve different purposes.

SocialThing: For the Collector

SocialThing is a good option for users who simply want to keep tabs on what their friends are doing online. When you join SocialThing, you give it your info for the various online services you are using that it supports. Then it will take a peek at your account for those services and bring in all the info for your friends on those services. When your buddy adds a new photo on Flickr, it will show up on your “Lifestream” in SocialThing, as well as their latest status update on Facebook, the site he just dugg on Digg, and that little thing about their favourite popsicle flavour on Twitter.

SocialThing is generally passive — you collect, you read, and you’re done. Instead of visiting eight sites, you just have to visit SocialThing to see if there’s anything on the other site worth drilling down to. There’s support for replying to Twitter messages directly on the site, and there’s a great feature where you can post to all the microblogging and status sites you are on at once, like Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, and Pownce (also see Tools below). SocialThing is not trying to be another social network, and by that I mean there’s no native content on it. It collects content from Web 2.0 sites for you and provides some bonus tools for status updates.

Pros:

• Automatically sucks in and maintains all your friends on the services you are on
• Easy to use with great UI
• Handy tools for updating all your microblogs and status updates at once

Cons:

• Only brings friend’s info for services you also use: if you want to see a friend’s Flickr updates, you need to be on Flickr too
• You are trusting the site with your passwords for your various services
• Still has big gaps in what services in supports, especially bringing in RSS feeds of your friends’ blogs

FriendFeed: For the Broadcaster and Chatty Cathy

Whereas SocialThing is best for collecting social networking content from your friends, FriendFeed is best for broadcasting your own to the world. Its appeal as an aggregator is limited by a choice only to suck in publicly available data from various social networking sites (like the list of your diggs on Digg) which means they are not going to ask you for your login info and bring in the list of friends from each site and autopopulate FriendFeed with updates from those friends. Your friends need to be members of FriendFeed, or you have to add them as “imaginary friends,” which is a pain in the ass, especially since few people outside the techie crowd are on the site. If your friends are on the site, then you can see all their updates on all the services they have added to FriendFeed, whether you are on those services or not.

FriendFeed lets you comment on anything pulled into the site. It’s an indicator that FriendFeed has ambitions beyond simply aggregation, but also sends mixed messages to the value of the site. I like it, but I understand those who balk at the idea of adding a layer of discussion of their Flickr photos at FriendFeed going on over all the discussion at Flickr. That said, it provides a forum for content like Google Reader shares that does not have any native discussion hooks.

Pros:

• Supports a ton of social sites
• Allows users to comment on any update on FriendFeed, which can turn Twitter “tweets” or other content into rewarding conversations and a great way to find new people
• Can export your social network updates as a feed for your blog (also neat to see your online life at a glance)
• Uses publicly available feeds from your social services and so limits some security issues

Cons:

• The Imaginary Friend feature to add updates from Friends not on FriendFeed is limited and laborious
• Blurs the line between aggregator or actual social network with comments and rooms, giving pause to those who might want to rein in their social-network data without having to keep tabs on another set of comments
• UI is simple to a fault. It can be hard to parse where the data if coming from at a glance and comment text is low-contrast and hard to read. The design has Gmail DNA in it but could use something a bit more polished like in the Digg family, or at least some CSS-skin options.

Suggestions and Tools

If the idea of only collecting social network data from your friends appeals to you, then SocialThing is worth checking out — it is all set-it-and-forget-it. If you just want to broadcast your data out there or you are interested in seeing what comments the world at large may have on your Flickr photos, diggs, and tweets, then FriendFeed is the place right now.

The great thing is you don’t have to choose just one and between the two you can really condense your online social world to a nice manageable, compact and fun place.

I use SocialThing to quickly keep tabs on what all my friends are doing online. I don’t use Facebook that much day-to-day anymore, but instead of closing down the account, I kept it to see my friends’ status reports. If you really want to keep track of friends on social sites you don’t subscribe to, there is always the option of signing up, adding those friends, and just following on SocialThing. I mentioned above that SocialThing has an handy all-in-one status updater. If you like that, then check out Ping.fm — it’s like that on steroids.

I use FriendFeed to see what people are talking about and quickly find some great links and resources that would have taken a lot of web mining to get to (if I got to them at all). FriendFeed is young, so chances are most of your friends are not there, but a lot of other people are: you’ll get some great people commenting on your stuff, and you’ll be sneaking peeks at their feeds and making new contacts soon enough.

In my perfect world, I’d have one site with SocialThing’s ability to find and maintain your contacts across all social platforms with FriendFeed’s ability to broadcast my own stuff and after-market commenting. Until then, using both sites is a pretty good solution.

Tagged as: digg, facebook, flickr, friendfeed, ping.fm, social networking, socialthing, twitter