Shiny Badges
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In the quest towards becoming early adapters, we often sign up for anything and everything. It seems every other day there are new services launching. Most of us feel we need to stake an early claim within that service just in case the it actually takes off. While a few make it, the majority fade away into web 2.0 oblivion.
It has become a requirement to establish an account on some of these services. It helps you further extend your personal brand, and it also gives you more visibility in the search engines. These are just two solid reasons. There is nothing to lose by establishing an account with all of these services, and everything to gain. At the very least, think of these sites as micro blogrolls. The profiles you establish with all of your correlating friends and your links to all of your web 2.0 services, is essentially what I call “passport blogrolling.” Most of these services only allow for one link, which is usually your homepage url. Having more link placement is great, but I’m just fine with having one solid link back to whatever my brand might be. From a marketing perspective, services that do not allow for some sort of profile creation with outbound links should be avoided.
I’m usually a sucker for any new shiny social media toy. I will usually sign up for anything with a web2.0 name and functionality. However, the repetitive task of finding your friends from the various social networking sites and adding them yet again to another new shiny service begins. Until OpenSocial is adapted and widely used, it’s not exactly an easy task finding all those friends spread across multiple networks. The lack of interoperability between the social networks, makes me even less inclined to spend the time searching for those friends. The ability to find and add friends via address lists from email accounts has become useless. I do not have the email address of more then half the people I interact with online.The quickest way I have found for finding my existing friends from sites such as FriendFeed, is to look for a popular friend and early adapter such as Louis Gray. Through his profile I can always find a good core of our mutual friends and begin to add them to my passport profile. There are a few hundred or so friends I can not locate. This is why now, more then ever, I will continue to network and invest my time in only one or two sites, and/or applications in their respective social spaces. Most of these new shiny toys in the end, end up becoming only shiny badges for blog sidebars.
