Social Media Heaven – Social Media HELL

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Social Media Heaven – Social Media HELL

Why is social media such a time sucking monster? Why don’t all social media sites make it easy to get a blog badge for their service? Why is it so hard to share data and info between sites? Why do I always feel I am not updating my data and/or status frequently enough?

Social media is this century’s heaven and hell!

I have been wanting to update my blog for a while and this weekend I got started. Didn’t finish. I am a developer consultant with over a decade in the programming business. It should be really easy for me to get a few badges together with links to my social media sites right? Well… after two evenings of (watching TV while) trying to put this together I can only conclude that it is not all that easy. Not even for a professional coder.

All I wanted to do was put some nice badges, links and perhaps a bit of live data from my social media sites on my blog. What I found was that many service providers don’t have that taken care of and wrapped up nicely with a bow for us site owners to use. There should be prepared scripts, html fragments, icons and link templates and more for everyone who wants to expose links to a service they use. The state of affairs is appalling. At many sites I had to screen dump their logo and rip it for my own!

This is not a review. It is not a rant. Or, at least I am trying not to let my bitterness hang to heavy over this post. I’ll keep trying to make my social media sidebar better than it is right now and I’ll keep you posted.

What I want to do with this post is

Show the stuff I have which as you all know by now is only a partial success so far. http://blog.noop.se (in case you are reading this from the feed)
Ask you to give me tips and tricks on where to get good badges and scripts to add to my blog sidebar?
Ask you guys who read it to comment and tell me what social media service I am missing that I should know about/be a member on?
And if you want… go and click on the one(s) you are a member of and connect to me!

Here are the current badges from site

As you can see I am listed on many many many, well at least quite a few social media sites. The info on the sites range from quite complete in one aspect of my life to not very complete in no aspects of my life. Reason for this is naturally because it is damn hard to go into each and every site and insert and maintain my info. I do wish there was a better way!

We social media service users demand:

Standards for data import and export to and from these sites. - I should be able to bring all I have in and take all my data back out when ever I want to.

An easy way to own our own information and social network. – As I kind of said above; it is MY data.

An easy way to own a map of our social network so that when we enter a new site we can immediately find and connect to people who are already in our social network on other sites. - Sure there are import your contacts functions but that’s not exactly what I mean. Plus I have to import from several contact lists.

A few quick comments on my current side bar:

Linkedin – Really good pro networking site.
Facebook – What can I say. De facto standard site for social networking on the Internet. Size the same of the population of Brazil. Lots of CRAP. And really good networking.
Plaxo – Just one more networking site.
Twitter – For those who think any one cares what they think. And really good networking.
Tripit – Awesome travel service site.
Flickr – Yes I am pretty too. Nice photo sharing/managing/storing service.
Friendfeed – As if Twitter wasn’t enough.
Live Messenger – I used to have ICQ as well. Have a really low member ID there. But it sucks to have many clients running at the same time.
Myspace – Now we’re getting low on data on me. This one is nearly empty.
Skype – Totally monstrous Internet phone service.
Windows Live spaces – I have an account. Not much more.
Brightkite – My first attempt at a location aware service. Let’s see how it pans out.

Open ID metadata tags

Finally – for this post: I’ve been wanting to add metadata to my blog site indicating I read Hanselmans post on OpenIDs and of course Simon Willison’s How to turn your blog into an OpenID.

It’s really cool and I urge the rest of you to do the same if you have access to putting links and meta tags in your own blogs head-tag. Mine are now added and if you view source on my blog you can find:

Which site/service do you see that I am missing? In what aspects am I wrong here? Or am I just a little bit right? – Please talk back!

Cheers,

Technorati Tags: Social Media