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Sunday, August 7, 2011

Cross platforming social networks - Can't we all just get along?

I think I like Google+'s format a little better than facebook, but does it really matter? It's the social networking concept that has become so popular, not a particular feature that one has and another doesn't. In other words, the biggest contributing factor to FB being the most popular is the fact that everyone's on it and it feeds on itself. What really needs to happen is that all the social networking sites be connected, cross platforming. It shouldn't matter which social network I use to communicate or publish something or which social networking site someone else is using if they want to communicate with me. It should work like email in the way that it doesn't matter if I have gmail and you have hotmail. This is already happening to a certain extent with cross posting of an article or a video but you have to have an account with all the sites you want to post on. That's a pain in the ass. It's too much work to have to update your profile and projects on several different social networks. The competitition to "take over" and try to get everyone to use just one site will never end and it's counterproductive to getting people to communicate. I know people who refuse to use FB because it's too commercial, it has an ugly interface, it's too addicting, etc. They should be able to choose a different social networking site and still be able to communicate with people on FB. This will ruin competition you might say? I don't think so because people will still have a choice as to which social networking site they want to use (again like hotmail versus gmail or yahoo mail) and the different companies would continue to try to make their site the most popular or try to find a niche market. Then the priority would be on features and functionality as opposed to feeling obligated because it's the one that has the most exposure or because "all my friends are on it."

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