The more I use social networks, the more impressed I am with it's usefulness for catching up with old friends and keeping a link to everyone I know. With the lifestyle I live at present (i.e. traveling), it's been fantastic for putting me in touch with some old friends I'd been wondering about. Obviously I'm sure there's a few people I didn't care to meet again ;)
But......I'm an email junkie. Been on it for over 10 years now and no intention of changing it. But now suddenly I find that as lots of people jump onto the Bebo/Facebook/MySpace bandwagon, they're using the 'comment' field and 'message' (email really) that's locked into the networks own systems. Which means I get a notification to my Gmail account to tell me that 'I've a new email from xyz' so I have to click on a link, sign in and then read their emails. Anyone else see the flaw in this?
O.k., I could just turn off all notifications but then again, I'm fairly sure I'd miss most of the messages as while Gmail just does email, the networking sites do their best to be jack-of-all-trades meaning that it's not always as clear what's new or updated.
so, anyone else wish there was some way to sort this out. Obviously, the nice way would be to allow integration (which I've blogged about before), but I can't really see this happening just yet as communication is the site's life-blood. All ideas are welcome.
On a side note, I saw an interesting quote from a prominent Web 2.0 blogger who commented that he saw social networking sites as telcos (i.e. they provide the network to communicate but are nothing more fancy) and couldn't really see the fad behind them. Interesting ideas, and if I can find the blog post again, I'll publish the link here. the joys of not having a permanent internet connection ;)
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