Social Media Silo's
I've been wondering about this topic for some time. I've been rereading The Cluetrain Manifesto and found it's been mentioned there as well. And now with the arrival of Google+ people are wondering if this will be the social backbone (must-read piece BTW!).
What am I talking about? Well, we have all these social tools that support parts of our lives. Some only work on the intranet, some only on the internet. Some are more for personal, private sharing, others are more work-related. Many have approximately the same functionality. So, you always get the question: Where should I share my information (without pushing the same information to all these services at once)? And where do I get an overview of all my social interactions?
I was hoping something like Friendfeed would solve this issue. It did, but then everybody left. I even tried to read tweets in Google Reader for some time. That didn't work well. So my silo's are still in place.
These silo's don't only affect creating of social content, but also consuming. A good step in the right direction is what Disqus is doing for blogs: collecting as much of the social interactions around a blogpost as possible. But what I can't do there is reply to a tweet directly from a blog comment.
And then Google+ popped up. Will Google+ solve this problem? I agree with this piece Google has a good chance. It's at least what they are headed for.
In my experience the overlap in functionality and social silo's are a huge barrier in the adoption of social tools. It's one of the reasons people stick with traditional tools, like email and even Facebook (compared to G+...). Everybody's in the email space, so why move to a space where only part of my social graph is?
I'm curious what your thoughts are on this topic. How do you solve this issue in your daily life?
