Well, ive been ranting on about social networking this and that recently, and ive almost cracked it. almost.
there are a couple of problems with all these social networking things – the first is that you sign up to 50 of them.
the second is that you have to put your profile info in 50 times – but its essentially the same information. the next is that you have to upload a  list of your email contacts and see if any of them are on it. none of mine ever are, my email contacts are a different kind of people from the kind of people I want on my social networks. if they werent, then id just be able to email them, right ?
the third problem is messages within these social places. you get a message on one of the platforms, but you have to login to that platform to check it and reply to it. If I get an email from ‘bob@bob.com’ into my inbox, I dont have to log into bob.com to read it, do I ? that just seems stupid.
one way ive found round the messages thing is to let yourself be emailed every time you get a new message. I have turned them all of, cos it ended up getting far to spammy, I hate how there isnt any kind of options to control the kind of messages you get – I only want to get mailed about direct contact with me – if someone posts a comment about me then I dont really want to know, most of these are spam, unless you are bebo, then I want th know about the comments, so you can sort it that way. it takes a long time to setup filters for your inbox to make all the social networking stuff go into a folderon its own.
I did find something cool that you can use to control your myspace and facebook accounts – https://fuser.com
its a beta, and is kinda like an online email program, but it handles your myspace accounts (you can add all your myspace accounts if you have more than one) and facebook accounts – its far from all of them, but you can reply to messages without going to myspace, which is quite nice.
another problem with social networking sites is updating them all. I use ping.fm for that. you loginto ping.fma nd give it all the deails about the networks you are part of – twitter, plurk, myspace, facebook, bebo, hi5 – there are about 25 of them so far. when you send a message to ping.fm (you can do it by text message, my sending an IM message through msn or yahoo chat, by sending a email or by loging into the site and typing it in a box) it then sends your message to all your social networks.
its far from integrated just now, which is kinda sad. its getting there though and I forsee the future as being far more easy to manage all this mess – you will (hopefully) be able to set one of your social networks as your ‘central’ profile, with all the others taking all their informaition from that central profile, getting all your status updates from your central profile and collecting all your comments, buletins and messages in the inbox of that central profile, and being able to, form that central profile hit reply to a message recieved from a different network and have that message replied to  the inbox of the persons account on the service they sent it from. – you should, hopefully be able to pick which network you want as the central one.