Myspace, Facebook, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg, Friendster, Youtube, and Twitter are just some of the many Social networks on the Internet open for membership. The problem is that because of the growth of social networking there are so many amazing services available online, and it makes it too difficult to keep all these services up-to-date. I, like many other people, have a habit of signing up for new social networks as soon as I can. Then, after a while, I can’t keep up with all my social profiles and certain accounts become dormant since I could not keep track of all the profiles.

Since the dawn of the Web 2.0 bubble, social networks spring up all over the Internet. Some are improvements of other services while others, are all new innovative services.  There is already such an excess of web services and it is hard to tell which is the best and even worse there are so many general-use social networks like Myspace and Facebook and it is very hard for users to connect with all their friends who use a variety of services. The inconvenience of having all these networks to keep up-to-date defeats any benefits of using the services in the first place. There also many single-purpose services like Flickr and Twitter, that do only one thing and in some cases they do that service extraordinarily well, like Flickr.     Meanwhile, there are many other services that are not that great and are not worth getting an account with.  The other problem, is that certain types of social networks like video networks are a dime a dozen, and many of them are just not as good as others.  But, even with all these services, they still each have their own separate account and cannot integrate with one-another for the most part. Facebook, has recently added applications that allows integration with other web services and allows you to merge accounts without actually merging them.

General-purpose networks like Facebook have the functions of many other services like, video, photos and chat. However, Facebook photo does not offer nearly as many features as Flickr as an example. I use many social networks, but, for my general purpose social profile, I use Facebook, because it simply has the best features and with Applications, it allows you to integrate you Facebook profile with many other social networks.

My recommendation to anyone who is considering creating a social network, is to only develop it if it is an original idea or if it has major advantages over existing services of a similar nature.  Even then, if the service already exists, it will be white noise to most people because they already have an account with that service.

I believe that for social networks to continue to thrive, they need to utilize more syndication of content, between networks and make APIs for developers to be able to make the best connection tools. I also think technologies like, OpenID that allow you to use one single login to access many services.