Prodded to investigate social network aggregators by a Mashable post I began hitting the list and creating accounts. What I learned real quick is that this space is young, underfunded, and in need of a little creative thinking. If you want the list I looked at go to the Mashables post, I didn’t hit all of them. And most of the rest I found disappointing. What was offered was not well thought out or I got a frustrated feeling that it would be so easy to just go a little further.

Two of them stood out as having the most potential: Spokeo and SocialURL. Both approach the problem in similar ways of allowing you trying to tie you to your network and all the services that everyone uses. I think this basic approach is good, but there is so much more that could be done with it.

Why not build a social network around all of these connections. Let me add mine to my profile. I manage my own “card” of information, flickr for photos, RSS for my blog, del.icio.us for bookmarks, etc. When a friend wants to connect the get access to all these public connections just by adding me to their contacts list.

The social site should specialize in facilitating the contact and profile exchange. Let the bookmark sites specialize in bookmarking, photo sites deal with photo’s and the blog software makers with blogging. Between API’s and RSS/Atom feeds this information can be aggregated together and easily shared.

I don’t want just an RSS reader, and I don’t want to have to build connections to everything the people in my network are sharing by managing their profile as well as mine.

Why reinvent the wheel with every new social network application? Specialization will insure that each application performs the best in its niche without having to worry about how do I deal with connections or how do I host photos or videos.

The social network companies should give me a way to manage all the data, not create new ways to store the data.

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