theregoesdave

V.

Once upon a time, people set their online status using their Instant Messenger away status. Twitter made status public and syndicated it for the world to see. Facebook integrated status messages into our social network profiles. Now everyone has started including the ability to set status on their site from Myspace to Linkedin and all hell is breaking lose.

These online status updates help us to share what we’re doing with our friends, loved ones and even business associates. We can share our latest news and challenges with everyone we know. Since they’re broken down into chunks as small as 140 characters for Twitter, we can keep track of dozens or even hundreds of our friends online.

Ping.fm now allows us to set our status and syndicate it to all of the major status, social network and micro-blogging platforms. One click can broadcast to our entire social graph, both near and far. This makes it easier to share, speak our minds and to sync all of these services using one input. While this is a great way to spread your message across the fertile field of the internet, how does it affect your audience?

It’s fairly easy to sync your Facebook and your Twitter status and they’re both networks where you’re likely to find a number of friends. However, now you have the same update appearing to your friends on both services. While this may be sure to get your point across, it can easily become repetitive and annoying for the people that you’re broadcasting to. Add more services to the mix and the problem compounds. Especially if you’re looking at the amazing capability of Ping.fm to update as many as eleven status services as once in addition to theirs.

To me, the most important factor about a service is the network effect. That is, people are most likely to end up using a service that their friends are on, thereby increasing the value of that network. For now, I’m using Twitter for my online status and Facebook and Linkedin as my primary social networks, but I’m very hesitant to cross-broadcast or add any other update services.

Just because you have a megaphone in your hand, it doesn’t mean you should go around shouting. Maybe we’ll see a unified status service as these networks find that users want a simple and uniform experience. Until then, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/theregoesdave if you want to see what I’m up to.

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