I am seriously unhappy with Social Networking as implemented today. There are too many sites and not enough information sharing. Each site hoards the information you put into it (countless hours no doubt). I’m pretty sure that most social networking sites would argue that their terms of service explain how they own that data and those relationships. Every new site requires me to re-enter my information and re-find my friends. Sure some applications try to help you find your existing contacts, but who knows what email address my friends used, or what user name they picked?

Why can’t I have a single global profile, where I list all of my identities on all of the sites with social networking (flickr, facebook, linkedin, etc). And have links on this global profile to all of my friends’ global profiles. Get all of the social networking sites to use this global format, and voila. Whenever I sign up for a new fadsocial networking site, I tell it where my global profile is, and then poof, it knows exactly who all of my friends are, and it can easily find all of the ones that have signed up for their new hotness. No work for me! Yay!

I guess this is what XFN and FOAF are for, but it’s a long way off…