If you are an active user on social media scene, you must be having different accounts on various platforms; an account on Facebook or Orkut to connect with friends, an account on Flickr to share images, a Linkedin account to network with people in your profession, a Youtube account to share videos. In addition you must be having your blog running via wordpress, typepad, Instablogs or blogger, and would be using twitter for microblogging.

So you are essentially creating your different identities across so many networks, that it is increasingly becoming difficult and to some extent impossible to keep track of. It’s also very difficult to escape this fragmentation, since a part of your network (your friends, peers, colleagues etc) could be active on one social platform while the other part may be on another platform.

Some of the sites like Friendfeed are trying to solve this problem by centralizing all the activity stream of your friends on a single network. Other solutions like data portability can be looked as an attempt to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, and social networking into their own systems.

Some thoughts

1. A centralized network of activity stream has its benefits, but there are times when you would prefer decentralization according to your network. It won`t make much sense sharing your Halloween outfit with your business network, or your business presentation with your young cousins.

2. Today most of the sites are fast embracing decentralization. Any activity done on any site can be easily exported to your preferred social networks. For e.g. Instablogs is working on tools which will allow you to port articles or comments posted on Instablogs automatically to your Twitter or Facebook accounts if you desire. Similarly images uploaded can be ported to your Flickr account.

3. Conversations would be taking place across platforms. For e.g a content article you posted on Instablogs could be replied on your Facebook or Twitter networks by your friends, and you can reply them on Instablogs platform. This means conservations around content will become more fragmented in nature.

4. Different opinions, links, articles related to a certain news event can be collected together to increase the context of the news event. You can see how your network and your friends’ network is reacting to it in real time.

5. Many solutions have already been in work which would give users more control over the content they produce on different networks and interconnect them. For e.g Distributed Social Networking” (DiSO) is an idea to move, aggregate and integrate activities, data and social connections built up on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and personal blogs.413483