Syncing My Friends, Feeling the Social Media Burn

I’ve been looking into ways to get my followers in sync between the various services I’m using, mainly FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and Identi.ca. It’s not easy. Of course there’s the Twitter 2 FriendFeed Importer, but ultimately, adding contacts is still very much a manual process these days. I tend to batch this process on a regular basis by going through my email and opening tab after tab (see?). This is insanity, actually.

My need for data portability is desperate. I’m literally wasting huge amounts of my time adding, adding, adding the same friends over and over again. If you’re my friend online, then you should just be my friend no matter what service I sign up for. I’m quite sick of it.

And for the most part, what we’re getting from developers are YAWA offerings – that’s “yet another web app” - instead of tools that help us manage the ones we have today. And because they’re these shiny new objects, we sign up, add friends, and the cycle repeats. It repeats because we’ve just proved to the app’s creators this is what we want. It repeats because we’re going to sign up for the next app, too.

So when I see someone trying to address this issue, I get excited. Whether it works or not, I’m excited because they care. They’re at least moving in the right direction.

I was excited about the post I did today on Genome. They’re trying to make identities flexible and portable, but did this get a lot of positive comments? No. And the ones left weren’t even that nice.

I don’t get it. Explain it to me, because today, I’m lost. Do we, as social media enthusiasts really only care about the next cool thing and not about the process of actually making these tools effective for the everyday user. Is that just “oh, ho-hum, that’s for someone else to worry about?”

I hope that’s not the case. Hey, I love the next new thing as much as the next guy (see identi.ca early adopter tips), but I give equal time to the problem-solvers, too.

So, on that note, here’s your problem solver tip for today:

From the same guy who brought you the Better FriendFeed Subscribed To Me script, comes the Better FriendFeed Recommended Page. It works by finding the subscriptions of your subscriptions and sorts them by popularity (mutual subscriptions) as shown below:

There you go, equal time. Something useful. That deserved a post.