apple juice

i’m trying to come up with a grand unified theory on social networking. i signed up for friendfeed on a whim the other day, after coming to the realization that using google reader was not designed to keep track of your friends on the 27 different services they use.

poking around on friendfeed, i started to run through the list of services they aggregate. let’s see, my blog. check. flickr, check. youtube, check, last.fm, amazon wishlists, netflix, twitter, it goes on and on. i tell myself that i sign up for these things in the name of research, to see what application they might have for education. but in reality i’m just curious. i’m on the fringes, really, in terms of being social. i don’t go to that many shows or events, i really just prefer hanging out with my close friends and family more than anything. i don’t really need to meet new people. i don’t need to network.

what’s all the frenzy about then? at necc, seeing people get all worked into a froth about how we need to be twittering with students is kind of funny. (actually, to be fair, i think that died down significantly this year). but certainly the movement exists amongst some in this tech-focused crowd that we all need to be hyper-connected with our students.

and amongst this larger group of people, all the people on friendfeed, brightkite, twitter, pownce, tumblr, etc, etc, there is the implicit acceptance that a large circle of people want or need to know your thoughts and whereabouts.

do they? i don’t know. i do know that i want to stop signing up for services. i think there are a number of problems with all of the current situations:

one set of friends reads my blog, another set looks at flickr, another set is on twitter, a pretty big group is on facebook, there are all of the people on my AIM, Yahoo, Google, and MSN buddy lists, and on and on.

it should be easy to integrate all of these things together and produce one site and one feed that puts it all together? is that desirable? or are the people who look at flickr a fundamentally different set of people than those who want to read my blog and post on my wall on facebook? besides, since I do utilize the privacy features on services such as facebook and flickr, the one unified feed would be pretty tough to pull off.

who cares where i am, what i’m thinking and what i take pictures of anyways?

sorry, i’m getting less clear. maybe if you have a thought about this, leave a comment. help me straighten this out in my head.