Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

Back in January, Kottke talked about how hard it was to keep up with social network sites— there are just too many of them. Well, the social network scene seems to be dying down a bit, but I’m getting overwhelmed with social list sites. There’s del.icio.us for bookmarks, all consuming for books, upcoming.org for shows, audio scrobbler for music, the facebook for classes, flickr for photos, and of course, social networks for people. It’s really a lot of work trying to watch and keep information about myself current.

Part of the difficulty is that this requires me to go to lots of different sites to update my information. RSS solved the problem of reading from lots of sources, but how do I write to lots of sources? Perhaps FOAF will save me, but I doubt it.

It’s interesting to see them all scramble to scale to large user bases and provide the same basic service: find people with the same interests or find similar interests (new music, new shows, new books, whatever). I’m not sure any of these services are doing a good job of scaling or providing suggestions. Amazon seems to do the best job of providing suggestions and you can keep many lists on there, but the community feels funny. I feel like I’m standing in a big store saying, “I like these things, you should buy them too!” to random strangers rather than hanging out on del.icio.us seeing what web sites other people find interesting.

So for now, most of these sites will be passing fads, but I eagerly await the day when things finally start to work.