Before we get into this I should qualify myself a bit. I have an entry in nearly every major social media site that exists and probably am still present in a few that have fallen out of favor. I’m on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, and probably some others I’ve forgotten. They all have their place and for the most part do what they do pretty well (although I’m still perplexed by Twitter, I’ve never figured out what it’s good for although I’m open to suggestions).
You wanna know something? I’m not really happy with any of them. Each of them merely serves a niche for me. Facebook is the place for people I actually know, Google+ is a good place for things I’m interested in, Pinterest is a nice Web scrapbook, Linkedin has my business contacts covered, and Twitter, well, it tweets along without much input from me. Why do I need five different sites for all of this stuff? This is a lot to keep track of and sadly there’s much that gets lost.
As far as I can telly only Twitter plays nice with all of them. That figures since nobody feels threatened by Twitter’s 140 characters. Pinterest is friends with Facebook and Google+ but has no use for Linkedin. And Linkedin, Facebook, and Google+ aren’t ever going to be friends no matter what. This leaves me with an annoying number of sites in my Social Media bookmark folder. It seems to me that it’s also an amazing opportunity for someone way smarter than I am to somehow tie all of these competing interests into a single site.
SEE ALSO: Being “The New Guy” In Social Media
Now Sauron tried this with the One Ring and that worked out ok until he got careless and had it cut off his finger. That little trinket turned out to be so powerful that nobody in Middle Earth had a good night’s sleep until it was destroyed (apparently the chance of keeping all of your fingers are low if you wear the One Ring). On the other hand One Social Site really appeals to me. A one stop shop for everything social where I can keep track of everything in one place. Yeah, I can already see where the concerns would come from when considering a site like this. I can see why someone wouldn’t want their business and social contacts in the same place, but if that part could be figured out..
Of the existing sites out there Google+ seems the most likely to be able to pull this off. Unfortunately for them they only have roughly 10% of the active users Facebook has. So while circles are cool and they have the ability to integrate a number of disparate parts they just don’t have the user base yet. Facebook on the other hand seems to have no interest in making it easy to firewall the various aspects of one’s social life. They just want to keep everyone connected as much as possible building play farms and taking care of imaginary pets. Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest and the rest are merely niche services happy with the little slice of pie they’ve cut out for themselves.
I think there’s still another service out there percolating in someone’s head. It will connect the disparate parts of our online social lives in a way that hasn’t yet been imagined. It will be a solution so simple, so elegantly done that once it’s seen everyone who looks at it will slap their foreheads and wonder how it was that no one thought of it before. It will grow on word of mouth much like Google did in its early days. I just wish I was smart enough to come up with it.
Author Bio: This post is written by Fred Fifield, Connect with him here.
