Distributed Social Networking: managing your profiles effeciently.

Today all of us have profiles on almost every popular networking tool be it social like facebook, orkut, blogger, wordpress or professional like linkedin, Xing etc. The problem is every time you open a new a/c, you have to duplicate all your personal, professional information on every single site. Not only that .... you also need to find and import all your buddies from one network to another, get all your snaps moved, your calendar, applications, activities etc etc. its just hell of a pain for no good and may even take several days before you actually start utilizing it fully. And then soon theres gonna be another tool on the block and bang you gotta move everything all over again :( this just goes on and on.

Thankfully there is a concept called "Distributed Social Networking" which is picking up pretty well and will solve such issues. The idea is to use already published information and achieve interoprability between multiple sites/applications. They use microformats, standard APIs and common protocols underneath to achieve this. Some of the tools can also be used as plug-ins. For instance, DiSo-project are building plug-ins that can be added to your wordpress wchich will then serve as your central platform to manage your distributed content. Of course with interoperability there will be new set of issues :) but hopefully things will be ironed out in some time.
So for instance if you have an a/c with X site and want to add friends from Y site and assuming both X and Y support common protocols (microformats), you should be able do it easily or if you want to import your flickr stream into your page (this actually works today as well in many networking sites but not using microformats) or even you can add your own activities, streams from your a/c on X to your new a/c on Y. There are lot of things you can do with these, i dont want to duplicate the information ;)
Check out the references for more detailed insight.

References:
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/portable_social_networks_building_blocks_of_a_social_web/
http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/video_on_distributed_social_network

-signing off
ameyas7