Problem statement: We have lots and lots of social networks out there, with more coming each day. Some of them we can ignore right from the beginning, as they are completely out of our interest circle, but how do we go about those that are of some interest to us? It’s really putting of when you have to fill in same information over and over again. But that’s OK, what is really annoying, is the fact that you have to build your own network around you from scratch.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a single point to control all social networking activities? A place where you could enter you details and preferences just once? A place where you keep your relation data, so that when you go and join another network all your existing friends re-connect to you immediately and you don’t have to start with an empty buddy list?

Solution: Market is recognising the demand and responding accordingly. There are at least two streams - full blown implementations and emerging standarts. Both are trying to address the same issue - lack of centralised control (or view) in decentralised system of social networks.

This is all very well and good. Only issue that I see, is that users might want to differentiate their social network on each site. For example you may not want your LinkedIn contacts to see pictures of yourself you are posting on MySpace. The problem here is that account on these “aggregators” might become a beast to manage with all sorts of different options and settings for each network you control from there. So, will the easiness and convenience of managing all accounts from one place outweigh the complexity of personalisation settings? We shall see…