The recent troubles over at Twitter have created a mass of confusion in what previously looked like a self-organizing social networking system. As in the real world, it takes time to settle into a new neighborhood and to discover how you fit into a community. However, Twitter's lack of ability to scale to its ever-expanding user base has resulted in an explosion of digital refugees who are now wandering through cyberspace in search of new homes.
Recent networks d' jour have included Plurk, which offers a new graphic spin on microblogging; identi.ca, which is gaining popularity due to its open source origins, and Ping has also entered the arena as a solution to centralize users' updates from a single location. On the flipside, FriendFeed is there to collect everything that you've been doing on multiple blogs, and to tie it all up in a neat little... mess. Of course, aggregating feeds is nothing new, and aside from standard RSS readers, other sites like Suprglu and Multiply have been doing this for quite a while, but adoption rates seem to be sluggish.
Therefore, we have tools to take a single message and to amplify it and reproduce it so that it colonize a series of locations across the web, and we also have tools to distill our scattered thoughts into a single point of convergence. We have the ability to broadcast a virtual presence to many sites, however, we are still lacking tools to maintain our connections and conversations within these communities.
We can discover past contacts within emergent social networking communities, but then we can just as easily lose them as they migrate due to the push-pull factors that exist within physical cities. We've taken a physically global community that is already transient, and we've created a hyper-global layer on top of it, where people exist in and shift between virtual spaces.
As we move towards increased choice (and let's face it, we've been ramping up to this for centuries - this is not a new phenomenon), how are we going to identify and select the best options as individuals? There is always the potential for engineers to write new scripts so that we can simplify complex networking choices, but is it more logical to just simplify and take calculated risks to begin with?
