Let's face it: you're not leaving Twitter for Facebook or Facebook for LinkedIn. We all already did the social network solidification dance from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook. Now social networks each serve a very distinct purpose. In the near future they won't. That's exactly what social networks are afraid of and why they won't talk with each other - solidification and redundancy.
I'm not concerned with that right now. As a consumer I'm concerned about time and efficiency, which I'm not getting. I need social networks to understand that I am @db on Twitter and /damienbasile on Facebook. Mainly what I need is for Facebook to be able to parse users Twitter @names into real linked Facebook names automatically. This is why I use Yakket on Facebook to filter out all Twitter messages with @names in them when sending them to Facebook.
People are sharing across multiple social networks at once nowadays. I can send a message from Foursquare to Twitter to Facebook & Linkedin. That's just one message. I may be on multiple networks but if I'm optimizing my time to post across them all then these networks need to recognize who I am across every one.
Another way how they're not speaking with each other: rich multimedia. I often post messages in Facebook that I've already shared in Twitter simply because links don't expand to show an image with a blurb like they do natively in Facebook. Facebook is all about the experience. If I see an update with some words and just a plain link I'm most likely going to 'next' it. No, in fact I AM going to 'next' it.
Eventually I see one thing happening. The social web will become more of a web. You, your identity and your relationships and how they translate & relate will move to front and center. Social networks will feel more like channels that you can change to see what's playing on another one. I could be wrong but I already am seeing more and more cross network chatter. It's only a matter of time before this issue comes to a head.
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