Graphing Social Patterns+Plaxo

I’m not there, but apparently Reid Hoffman’s keynote at the Graphing Social Patterns conference contained the prediction that there will always be more than one social graph. Oh trust me, I wish there were only one. I have just spent almost an hour trying to recall all the passwords and user names to compose this post.

Hoffman is someone who carries a lot of authority, since he was the founding CEO of LinkedIn, which is still respected as a professional networking site. Linked In can be very useful if you are looking for someone in a particular business or company who won’t return your phone calls, or whose email address you are trying to get.

But I am desperate to aggregate my LinkedIn connections on Facebook, because now I have signed up for so many social networks that I can’t possibly visit them all. Just for fun, let me count the ways I could graph my own social pattern:

1)My family is now mostly on Facebook. (Brother, two daughters, a niece. Stepsons MIA)This means we can share dog photos and I can find out how my niece is doing at college.
2)My friends are mostly on Twitter and Facebook. I have no idea if they are on LinkedIn.
3)My professional connections are all over the place: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Plaxo.
4)My photos are at Flickr, Zooomr(dogs), and Facebook. I find it more difficult to share them on Facebook since all my friends aren’t on it, so I post them multiple places.
5)My videos are split between Kyte, Google video, YouTube, and Facebook.
6)To send links and files, I use Pownce.

I also have created profiles at Tagged, Jaiku, Doostang, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, and perhaps some that I don’t remember. I don’t ever visit these, except when someone who uses them or is trying to use them asks me to connect to him. In most cases, I connect.

Unless I don’t know the person. Unless they are a spammer who clearly doesn’t know me.

Or unless the request comes from Plaxo. Plaxo used to be the site that spammed your address book for updates on a regular basis. You could LOSE, rather than make friends through Plaxo. We all quit using it, and the company got its act together.

And then this summer, they released Pulse. their social network. And since then I have been spammed again. This time by erstwhile “business associates,” most of them in sales, and none of whom I know. So while it was nice to have a tool that kept my addresses synced, I may have to bid Plaxo bye-bye.

What I want is a nice comfy place with a good user-interface (some appropriate ads can come along with it) where I can find everybody in my life.

Kind of like my “little black book” used to be. Battered and worn, trustworthy and familiar.