Walled gardens
I read an interesting article on the BBC News pages this morning concerning social networks. The conclusion of the article is that social networks are often walled gardens and profile informaton is rarely exportable or importable. Here is an extract:
“The irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness is stifling their potential.”
As each social network (and there are a surprising number of them) vies for your attention in every niche you could imagine you find yourself with a choice. Either you restrain your membership of these sites to just one or two or you find yourself filling up each and every profile with more or less the same information.
One solution would be to manage your profile separately (and preferably your private and public profiles as sub-profiles). One such approach would be to have an “Open Identity”.
There are several Open Identity initiatives and here is some further reading.