My Widget Wad

Today’s landscape of online social networks is vast and fragmented. How many profiles can a social human really endure before networking fatigue takes over? The great value of online communities lies in connections between people, yet many social networks today function solely to gather as many members as possible, pulling those people away from other competing communities.

So, I have begun a dangerous experiment. Today I embark on a journey to sign up for every social network that ever there was. So far I have accounts on almost 30 of them. I have my Facebook account, a MySpace page, a LinkedIn account, and the list goes on. I am collecting cut-and-paste widgets from every network I join, like they were postcards or treasured little travel mementos. I am documenting my journeys by sticking a widget or button from each community onto one single page on my website. One long JavaScript nightmare of a page. By the time I am done, I will be in possession of The Largest Widget Wad on the Internet.

I have so far learned this: I want to own my profile. My data is mine. But, I really want to share it with people across the world thru online communities. Each service basically asks for the same data. Sure, each service has a unique twist…so just ask me the questions that are different. I want a social pass key that will allow me into all of these sites easily. I want to be able to walk up to the Flickr community door, step in (with extremely minor verification/signup requirements) and start socializing. My data follows me, but when I am in different virtual locations, I want access to different functionality. My experience with my SecondLife 3D avatar will be different than my Jobster account, but each will be fed by my latest data.


Facebook understands this and has opened their API to outside developers. Will their dominance translate into what some are dubbing the operating system for social networks? Will this create a vast playground of socializing on a Facebook platform, with a few rouge, anti-Facebook communities going “off-the-grid”?

There are already a number of companies providing aggregation software which will gather all your data and even update all your social network profiles at the same time. Do you have a new favorite band and an unstoppable desire to share it with 9,000 of your closest friends? Just click on over to ProfileLinker, OtherEgo or Profilactic and use their services to socially network with your social networks.

Open source efforts are also attempting to create a viable standard. For example, the volunteers at Open ID are attempting to create a URL-like ID for individuals. This group describes itself as, "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity."

Other sites like Ning, MyLifeBrand, GoingOn and CrowdVine allow users to create their own social networks, fragmenting the community even further.

So I stand here before you with a pledge. Until I get my social pass key, my Widget Wad will continue to grow long and tall. I will continue to add silly widgets from every community I join until the spaghetti code of the page grows so unruly that it takes over the whole dang web!

This is a call for an extensible social networking language with personal data-sharing protocols. I demand it. Don’t make me use my wad!