The Social Networking Orgy: What the ---- ?!

OK, we've got, like, a stinkin' bacchanal of social networking strategery going on today, and I don't know about you, but most of the time I don't have ANY idea what these companies are talking about or how I'll use what they're offering.

Google's got this Friend Connect thing. "Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web," its press release says.

Microsoft has a new service that will "allow users to watch video clips at the same time as a network of friends and chat via Windows Live Messenger."

Facebook on Friday said it will make its user profiles portable. "Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method," the company said.

Ultimately, I get that the idea is that everyone can have one profile that they can use no matter what Web site they're on. No more forgetting to delete the photos of you with your previous girlfriend on Orkut.

And I get that every Web site should eventually seem "alive." You're shopping on Amazon, reading news here on Portolio.com, checking how much value your house has lost on Zillow -- wherever you are, you should be able to see if any of your friends from any social network are also there at the same time, and if so, chat with them. It should be the Web equivalent of being able to visually see someone you know coming toward you down the aisle at Home Depot.

BUT -- I read these news items and have two personal reactions.

1. These baby steps are painful and I don't know what each of them means, where I'll encounter them, or how I'll use them. They come across as a whole lot of tech nerd gibberish. And it is obvious that every company that's behind in social networking (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo) is throwing everything it can think of at the wall and hoping something sticks.

2. I don't believe that the ultimate solution of a single portable profile and open access to all your friends on any Web site will ever happen. If that was ever going to be possible, it would've happened by now with instant messaging -- and in a better way than the only way it's happening now: with outsider Meebo grafting the different IM networks into a single site.

How about we lock Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft and Google in a room and not let them come out with any press releases until they have a working system figured out.

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