FactoryCity offers this advice in a
recent post: Stop
Building Social Networks. I’m a sucker for a good, enticing headline. This
one is especially provocative coming from Chris Messina.

This isn’t about getting connected online with your friends,
it’s about having to re-up your profile and get your friends to join up every
time you sign up for a new online service. 

Chris asks every single social network community site makes
you:

• re-enter
  all your personal profile info (name, email, birthday, URL etc.)?
• re-add
  all your friends?

and why do you have to:

• re-turn
  off notifications?
• re-specify
  privacy preferences?
• re-block
  negative
  people? 

I believe what Chris is really saying is: Okay Web
Developers of social networking sites, we’ll let you slide on Web 2.0, but Web
3.0 needs to allow for single profile creation among many sites. Sounds like global data
synchronization of everything about me in one easy to share database. Makes
absolute sense. A master
data management solution to keep you and your P2P (person to person)
community sharing everything you want to share. It might even work for those
continually abandoning
their profiles when they forget their passwords.

One commenter offered this.

While Chris Messina may think that the fatigue effect
hasn’t spread beyond the social geeks I would suggest that the word social is
very quickly becoming one of the most used and misused words on the internet to
the point people are starting to gag when they read or hear it. After all it is
nothing more than a term of convenience because anyone who thinks that the act
of sitting behind a keyboard and monitor to communicate with other people is
being social needs a head check.

The Bottom Line: This one begs for a comment, especially
from social geeks and web developers. Any thoughts on the matter?