What a tangled Social Network Web we weave

I’ve been playing with Ping.Fm and going to be using it to update all the social networks I’m part of. Turns out there are 16 social networks that I’ll be updating when I send something to Ping. Yup, I have an account on 16 different network, and that’s not a complete list, as I can list a bunch of social bookmarking sites I have accounts on that aren’t on the list.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe this fragmentation is useful as the real power of social network centers around the people you interact with, and interacting with a few people in each network really doesn’t do much good. For example, I signed up on Pownce, but there aren’t too many people there I interact with, so it fell by the wayside. Again, I also joined Brightkite, but still haven’t had any traction there. Well, now I can just Ping and all my networks get a notification. Twitter is still my main way of finding out what’s going on in the world though.