I’ve realized a long time ago that my personal web diary in in Swedish – 2good.nu – has been obsoleted by my Facebook account. Same with the diary for our first-born child. I didn’t even start a blog for our second child.
This is quite OK, as my home-made web diary software – even rewritten in Zend Framework – will never have the same features as Facebook. There are no comments, photo uploads, likes, mentions of friends, etc, that the existing social networks already implement.
Of course I also have a Twitter account, @davideriksson, that complements this blog with mostly English-language updates regarding software development and related topics. I actually use Google Buzz for sharing some stuff with friends, and it is also connected to my Twitter account.
I never use my Orkut account so let’s ignore that. Should I mention my LinkedIn account? By its nature it is almost purely for my professional relations.
Now comes Google+ and I will give it a try as soon as they accept the invitation I have. Should I spend/waste my time on yet another social network, connected to more or less the same people?
What I want is to publish stuff (blog posts, links, photos, videos, status updates) in one place, and have it reach the desired target group (or Social Cicle, in Google+ speak). Something like Diaspora sounds like a good idea, but it is not click-and-play and does it integrate with the other social networks mentioned previously? I’m not so sure.
Ideally I publish something on Facebook and it ends up in the corresponding social circles in Google+, and the other way around.
Another solution would to be that I publish everything from my personal site, and it pushes it to the corresponding systems. Maybe I have to implement photo upload after all? And build an Android client? No, I should not have to.
A better solution would be that a single social network is my “main” one and it provides an API that I can use to share data to other social networks. Maybe Google+ is that social network, but it does not have a public API yet. I still have to build stuff, but integrating systems is much more fun than implementing photo upload… 🙂
To see what others publish I realize that I still need to connect to each social network, but I’m probably curious enough!