The Greatest Challenge to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is Unbundling
tomtunguz.com
tomtunguz.com
Maintaining these connections across multiple accounts is a huge pain. None of the existing social networks have any incentive to make this process easier, whether by providing an export tool or conforming to an open "friends list" standard.
Specialized Craigslist clones can exist because no one wants to sell apartment space to the same people they buy used furniture from. Friends are friends, though; if you want to share videos with them, there's a good chance you want to see what the tweet, too.
(There is the dark path of spamming your users' contacts from another network, but we know where it leads.)
Tangentially, Google could have played upon this with plus, if they had made into the social foundation for others to create verticals to rival with Facebook. Too bad they didn't go this way.
Instead, what we have today is G+ as a glue that provides a social foundation for all of their products, although I hope that G+ will open up soon to allow others to build upon it.
I've written some articles about how I see this future integrations but being self critical I think it is impossible without full APIs. I also wrote recently an article using similar concepts for challenging Google http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...
Admittedly, twitter's interface isn't the best for what it is (and they keep shutting down tools/sites/apps that might end up with a better interface found via experimentation), and there have been (some successful) attempts at a tool that abstracts away the social network and technical part of different sites and lets you interact with more of them at once.
Oddly, it seems other people sometimes do mind going to other sites. Family wanted to know why I didn't post photos to facebook so they could see them. I had been posting links to other sites where I had uploaded them for public viewing and apparently even clicking on a link to go see them was too much cognitive load.
However, what I do mind is the walled garden nature of the different sites that keep me from easily and effectively aggregating all my actions across the internet into a single place: both for my own purposes and as a jumping off point for other people to explore.However, twitter keeps shutting down easy access to my data (I can't tell if the v1 api call for favorites via RSS is still enabled, it seems to periodically work; last I checked, there doesn't appear to be a new way, without oauth, to get a feed of favorites). Facebook has an "export" function, but it seems to be all or nothing and single shot, and integrating. Flickr generally has good external integration via simple RSS, but I think that's because Flickr "gets it": they are a photo sharing site and they are not focused on keeping people on the site. That's most likely due to their monetization model.
Unfortunately, services that did this, like friendfeed and memolane, are dead or dying. It's really hard to create and maintain one, especially one that is more unified interface than just data aggregation, when the landscape for sharing and integration keeps changing out from under you as sites try to lock users in. The focus on creating an all-in-one do-everything experience rather than something that compliments the features of other sites contributes to this, I think.
In my perspective things change when you are using services for business rather than personal consumption. There are SO MANY sites that can capture your interest or where you want to just duplicate that blog post or copy your tweet to other sites, and are impossible to manage because we all have 24 hours days.
In some way it is the same problem that arises in the long tail: probably there is a product that a million people want to consume but is unknown. Probably there are hundreds but we humans can't focus and handle periodically so many items. I think the problem is not the lack of resources but tools that help you to pick many of them with a simple interface.
By trying to be everything at the same time, they become cluttered and complicated.
As for this article, I'm reminded of a similar story with a different point of view posted on Medium: https://medium.com/understandings-epiphanies/aae8d5f880cc
I do question question the long term value of social networks that operate under what has become the traditional advertising model as teens move towards apps that are more privacy conscious.