As I spend an increasing amount of time on social networks, I have begun wondering when social networking stopped being something that you do for fun and became a daily chore. In 2002 I received an invite to Friendster which at the time was an invite only social network. I was excited and immediately began to connect with all of my friends that I knew on the site. Then MySpace launched and all of my friends shifted to the new and cool social network and I suddenly re-connected with the same friends.

Soon after MySpace launched I tried creating my own social network only to have Facebook, the network that I now obsessively cover, beat me to the punch. This story is not about how I got beat out by a formidable competitor but instead about how soon enough social networking would become more of a task than an enjoyable past-time. LinkedIn was the beginning of using social networking professionally but at some point last year, Facebook also became the network of choice for many of my professional contacts.

Once that occurred, Facebook suddenly became a chore for me. Perhaps I am to blame as I set up a blog that was specifically about Facebook. Facebook became my job and as such it became party of my daily routine. I have a feeling that this isn’t only happening to me though and is now a problem that many of us face. Has social networking become a job for you? Is it something that you do in your free time or have you now forced yourself to use it for managing you business contacts?

Yahoo might be in some finical problems, but man can they set the world on fire when they need to. I follow everything Yahoo because I have been using the service since I discovered the internet over a decade ago.

Yahoo has been putting a great deal of muscle behind its mobile division and they have a good product in their Yahoo Go mobile application. Yahoo announced today that they will be launching a new service called Yahoo oneConnect. My heart fluttered.

Basically oneConnect is going to borrow the Yahoo Go platform and create one mobile application that allows you to seamlessly integrate social networks with your mobile phone. I know what your saying, “I already have a mobile application for ____.” Yahoo oneConnect will be different.

After using the Go application I can say that the platform is pretty sturdy. Go creates nice visuals and allows for network intergeneration from my mobile; always a plus. OneConnect plans to intergrate the following social networks into a mobile platform; Bebo, Friendster, MySpace, Dopplr, hi5, Twitter, Facebook, last.fm, Flickr, and LinkedIn.

The thing that amazes me is that Yahoo is making all of this into a mobile application. If Yahoo can integrate all these applications to my mobile and to my Yahoo contacts I will be able to stay up to date with all of my social network contacts IN ONE PLACE. I can’t even do that on my laptop, let alone my smartphone.

All of these integrations will be covered in the PULSE section of the oneConect application. To be honest it sounds like Yahoo might have a ‘Killer App’ here. I really can’t see someone who is integrated into social media not wanting to use this app, if it works.

Again, using Go as a model you can assume that oneConnect will work on most of the phones that Go works on. You can also assume that Yahoo is going try and saturate the phone market to capitalize on mobile intergeneration before its competitors can.

I am excited about this development, but are any of you out there excited about it? I know I would love to be a beta tester for this product (Yahoo you have me email address PLEASE contact me) and I will be following oneConnects development as it happens.

Thanks to Alec Saunders who points out a press release posted on the Cellular-News website. The press release states that mobile social networks will account for $52 billion in revenue by 2012 given the high growth scenario. How did they come up with these numbers? Well if you take 30-50% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) multiply that by seventeen divide by twelve, throw that number into the mobile social network growth calculation formula you will end up with a bazillion dollars.

Well maybe not a bazillion but you get the idea. According to the post, mobile social networking has reached critical mass and Japan is poised to explode in the U.S. This will be a follow-up to the attack of the killer bees that will begin by killing off most of Texas sometime later this year. Toward the end of the press release it is stated that much of the growth will be dependent on mobile network operator policies.

There is no doubt that mobile social networks will be big in the coming years but the amount of money to be generated by them is still questionable. Not even web based social networks have come up with effective revenue models. MySpace, the largest social network on the web, made less than one billion dollars last year. Facebook brought in approximately $150 million in revenue last year and is expected to reach over $325 million by the end of this year. So how did they come up with $52 billion from mobile social networks?

Yesterday I got sucked into the site Ted.com which is not hard to do. While watching an inspiring video I began to wonder about the impact of social technology. I spend so much time thinking about news pertaining to social networks and social media or about how it improves advertising or about a number of issues pertaining to it. Not yet have I considered specifically how social technology can be used to positively effect peoples’ lives. I don’t mean to get sappy but it is something to consider.

I see social networks such as Razoo.com, a D.C. based social network for change, in addition to sites such as Change.org, Zaadz.com, Gaia.com and a number of others. While I think that the technology is transforming our lives I think it becomes very easy to become overly dependent on social technology to solve many of our problems or quickly generate weak-ties to others.  While we can become overly dependent, social technology must be capable of generating inspiring stories from people that have connected thanks to these new services.

I know that thanks to social media I now have hundreds if not thousands more contacts and I have now been able to expand my personal brand. While not a particularly inspiring story necessarily, it has been life-changing.  As such there must be other stories by people where thanks to social technology their lives have been changed for the better. Has your life been positively changed thanks to social technology? What stories have you heard of others? How can we use social technology be used to drive change?

While browsing through my Google Reader today I came across an article about a new mobile social network that will launch at Mobile World Conference. It wasn’t the social network that interested me in particular (although it’s definitely an interesting product), it was yet another social network that I have to register for. I am honestly fed up with having to register for websites. As someone who regularly registers for new sites, I’d like to have an easier way to manage my identity.

This is only the beginning of new services being launched. We will see thousands of new social networks spring up in the coming years and we will be forced to register to see what new services they offer. While on the basic level this may not appear to be a significant problem imagine how many people ask “what if I built a social network that …” each and every day. A large percentage of those people will eventually succeed at building their social networks whether or not their social networks are successful (most won’t be as Brian Oberkirch points out).

So as these spring up it is ultimately in our best interests to have a central location for managing all the places that have our identity. We should also be able to turn off websites’ access to our personal information. If you don’t know what OpenID is then go read about it, this post isn’t about what it is but why we aren’t using it? Personally, I haven’t embraced OpenID because most large social networks have yet to embrace it. Once they do I will be the first person to start using OpenID full-time.

Given that OpenID is already the solution for the multiple logins and multiple digital identities, why doesn’t the government step in? At this point I consider it a privacy issue and without it we will maintain the chaotic landscape of social networks that currently exists. I realize that this is nowhere near as important as ending war or fixing our healthcare system but it’s definitely an important in the digital age.

Something came to me this weekend when I was sitting at home playing Call of Duty 4 on my PS3, the world has changed. It took me all this time to figure it out, but I am pretty sure the world is not the same place I grew up in.

Let me set the stage for you: I was playing COD4, not doing so well, when I began to swear. I was in the Navy so I swear like a sailor, then a voice came over my headset and began to speak to me.

“LaFauce,” the voice said. “Could you please not use that language here, my son is playing the game and I try not to expose him to that type of language.” I had to pause, I was playing probably one of the most intense and violent games on the market today, and someone was reprimanding me for my language.

After talking with the voice for a bit I found out that the parents monitor what the child is playing online by watching him play. They then comment on anything inappropriate or tell the child he can no longer play if the room becomes obscene. The child was 14.

There was a great deal wrong with this entire interaction. One one hand I applaud the parents for monitoring what their child does online, but who lets a 14 year old play Call of Duty? Then to reprimand me for using foul language just seemed moronic.

I assumed everyone one playing that game was of at least the age where I could use foul language around them. What if I had said somethings that were really offensive, could the parents have found a way to say I was corrupting their child?

I think about it like this: When I go to a bar I assume everyone there is 21. Now if I say something inappropriate or do something inappropriate I at least I have the law on my side saying that I am surrounded by adults and I am not corrupting any youth.

The world has changed, just as we manage who can vote, own a fire arm, and drink, perhaps we should regulate who uses social networks. Already we have standards set up to control who visits what sites, should social networks have the same standards? Could we legally regulate who goes where on the web?

I spend a great deal of time online and I worry constantly about who I interact with. Do any of you out there feel the same way? Are any of you afraid of saying the wrong thing or sending the wrong email to someone?

Last week I brought up the issue of the effectiveness of social ads. The debate rages on with Joshua Porter providing insight as to why social advertising will never be as effective as search advertising. I have to agree with Joshua that search can actively track intent and thus is more effective. Users browsing through their friends’ profiles are not actively looking for something and are instead passively hanging out on the site waiting to find something of interest.

I honestly don’t think that social advertising will ever generate more than search but if it can generate a fraction of what search generates it will still prove to be highly lucrative. I also believe that combined with search, social advertising can increase ad conversions. I have been saying for a while that the value of social networks are not the websites themselves but instead the information that the sites have on each user.

I always use the example of browsing through CNN.com and having an advertisement that is targeted at you based on your Facebook profile data. Another possible value would be the combination of Google and Facebook. Not only do you receive ads that are targeted at your geographic location and based on your intent but you also get advertisements that are based on other demographic information.

This is still theory though and there is no data to back up my assertions unfortunately. Joshua Porter definitely makes some great points on his post and concludes that nothing will monetize more effectively on than search on the web. Do you think social advertising can work?

Yesterday, Ann Handley posted an article on The Huffington Post about how it’s rapidly becoming too much work to maintain all the contacts that she amassed on Facebook. This is become a serious problem for many of us as we now have social tools that enable us to stay connected with a much larger number of contacts than ever before. We end up with hundreds if not thousands of contacts spread across our email, social networks, instant message clients and countless websites.

On Friday I discussed how social media is overwhelming. This has become a serious problem. This isn’t really a new problem but is instead a problem that more people face thanks to the new technologies that make it easier to stay connected with others. A simple wall post on Facebook, tweet reply to someone on Twitter or web based purchase of a gift package for that special client can be all it takes to maintain a relationship.

Now multiply that activity by hundreds and you suddenly end up with a lot of time being spent in order to stay connected. There are definite trade-offs for staying connected. On one end you can stay connected with people that you care about as well as those that will bring you future business. On the other you now have a visualization of relational opportunity (a phrase I’ve made up to represent the added value of maintaining a connection) and decide that it’s better to maintain hundreds or thousands of connections to avoid the missed opportunity by not keeping in touch.

So how do we handle the overload after overbuilding our personal networks (which is inevitable on social networks)? I personally haven’t come up with a perfect solution but here are a few ideas I’ve come up with:

• Understand your personal threshold - Rather than obsessively commenting on everything that any of your friends or family post be selective about what you take the time to discuss. Ultimately the discussion has only begun once you make a statement in response to any of your contacts’ actions.
• Limit your social network activity - Rather than spending hours a day on Facebook or another social network, limit the amount of time you spend on them and specify the times of day that you will surf through your contacts.
• Outsource your life - Personally, I don’t like this option but Tim Ferris claims to have been successful at it. If you want to try this route there is really no limit on how large your network can get. The alternative to this is hiring your own personal assistant but I’d assume most of us cannot afford such a luxury.
• Leverage the newsfeed - Rather than browsing across all of the sites you have activity on, personal newsfeeds such as FriendFeed and Facebook’s newsfeed will help us to filter out what is important and what isn’t. While we aren’t there yet it is coming soon.

Have any other useful tools for managing social networking activity? Do you think it’s possible to maintain a large digital identity? I surely haven’t figured out an effective way yet. I’d love to get any advice you have.

Peter Kafka has posted the January comScore statistics for Facebook and MySpace and last month wasn’t too great. A quick look at Compete.com statistics for Facebook.com shows a pattern of decreased activity during the months of December and January as a seasonal problem. As I will be covering in my post early tomorrow morning users are becoming fatigued from social networks though making it increasingly important for these sites to come up with effective monetization strategies.

As the user base increases on sites like Facebook and MySpace we are also witnessing a decrease in general activity. This is expected though. Early users on social networks are typically more active then the late-comers. Also reading too deep into monthly comScore statistics is never to useful. It is much better instead to look at year over year growth of page views and time spent on the site.

Facebook experienced 23 percent growth in page views over the past year and an 80.5 percent growth the total number of minutes spent on the site. MySpace on the other hand experienced an 8.6 percent growth in page views over the past year and was flat for the total number of minutes spent on the site compared to last year. Honestly, I think January numbers a less effective gauge for future growth. Wait for February statistics to see if there is a pattern of decreased traffic.

One surprising note in the comScore data was a 13.7 percent gain in the number of minutes spent by each user on MySpace.  That’s a significant gain for the social networking behemoth.

If you are reading this, there’s a good chance that you are relatively active in social media or online in general. You may have your instant messaging client open (if you don’t have more than one), your Twitter application is in the corner of your screen, you are getting emails into your never-ending inbox and some of your friends are text messaging you to see what you are up to this weekend (unless you are married in which case your husband or wife may just be texting you).

If you are like me then you also have a long to-do list which never is clean. Whether we realized it or not when we got in to it, social media is really just media about ourselves. If you are to embrace all that social media has to offer you will soon be overloaded with way too many tools to make your life “easier.” Eventually it will become too much and you will either give up entirely, figure out a way to manage it or continue down the path of never-ending noise.

Wherever you fit in the picture, you should be extremely satisfied when you take a look at the social media map that Josh Catone just posted. It’s overwhelming, just as social media is and best of all it has it’s own to-do list just as most of us do. When I first saw the image it struck a cord with me. I can step back and look at the chaos that lives within my virtual life and realize that this is part of the reason. Do you have the same experience of information overload? Is this graph an accurate representation of your social media life, or are parts missing?