I’m addicted to social networking websites.
Social networks have invaded the internet by storm over the past decade or so. There are way too many to count, but only a few cater to a general audience of any background. The obvious ones are the big names like Facebook or Twitter, and even MySpace (yes, people still use MySpace!). There are many more that cater to a select demographic: religions, ethnicity, political opinion, location, … the list goes on. What we lack is the “one site to rule them all,” let me explain.
Out of all the options, I think Facebook comes the closest to what I want. It is useful for bringing together content from other sites (Youtube, Flickr, any site that implements “Share This”), but it really needs two-way syncing to make it the “one-stop-shop” social network. They shouldn’t be afraid to embrace collaborating with the competition like Twitter, Google or MySpace. The fact is, both Twitter and MySpace provide open APIs which Facebook could work with to pull and submit content from them.
Another missing feature are multiple options for single sign-on. The concept of single sign-on is great, and I like that fact that several websites provide the ability for me to login with my Facebook, Twitter, or Google accounts. For it to really work, they should be inter-operable with each other as well. I should be able to login to my Facebook with Twitter or Google, and the same goes for them.
Finally, I’d like a social network to seamlessly sync my media from other websites. I use YouTube to host videos and Flickr to host my photographs, because in my opinion they’re the best options for videos and pictures. I think Facebook should display my Flickr photos alongside my Facebook hosted photos (without me having to upload them again), and my YouTube videos as well. This would be better for them anyway since they wouldn’t even have to host the files. There are options for displaying my Flickr photos in my profile, but they stand out, in a box, on my profile. This might be asking for too much, but it would also be nice for them to sync photos I upload to Facebook with my Flickr account.
As useful as Facebook is to me, I still need to visit other social networking websites. I believe, that the three improvements I listed would truly make Facebook the only social network I’d ever have to visit. I love surfing the web, and discovering new content, but this is the exception because they all seem to serve the exact same purpose, and I pretty much do the exact same thing on several of them only because different friends on each. That, and because I’m addicted to them.
