I’ve been kicking the idea of a central way to manage accounts on many social networking apps for a while now. I think it starts to go beyond just managing social-network accounts because what your really doing is managing identity.
Some are saying that 2008 is the time for this sort of “killer app”. Google have also started to chip away at the problem offering a way to update your status in many places at once.
Some ideas that I have had along those lines are:
- Manage all you private messages via your email client, as if they were just additional IMAP mailboxes. This could be done if the web-app implemented the IMAP/SMTP protocol but stored all the messages in a DB so it could be accessed via the website.
- Use something like FOAF to maintain a central place for all personal info. You could also control which networks had access to which parts of your profile, say only showing your mobile number to Bebo for example.
- Have RSS aggregation for all the feeds from all of your accounts providing a sort of global view of all your online identity, perhaps filtering by ‘private’ and ‘professional’ or anyway you like. Bernard has something similar.
wow, just randomly stumbled into your blog while searching for the subject of this post. had similar thoughts about a multiple-site management tool as an app as well, think you are right that it would morph into identity management.
Nonetheless, especially for anyone doing online media, working on multiple social networking sites (think bands) even a less comprehensive option could be useful. Anyway, cool blog….