Discovering the fragmented Web 2.0

I find it rather funny when somebody I know is discovering something on the web I've been using for month, which seem like years really.

Pil just discovered Facebook and online social networks. Those have been around for a while, some have had appeal, others are attracting crowds. They all have similar features but it's what they have specific that make or breaks them. Facebook has this nice picture tagging feature or the friend game. There's really a myriad of those sites, which is rather unfortunate.

When I saw Eric and Kris, we talked about Web 2.0 and how some people are just discovering it. It happens Eric hadn't heard of some of like flickr and just heard of digg. It's rather nice to see how fast people catch on those. But I'm bothered by the fragmentation of it all, especially social networks. It's painful to have to sign up to 5 different sites to keep track of friend that way. I'd just use email since that's universal but it's so old school. Seriously though, there should be some kind of common ground for those sites. Signing up on one and accessing what's on another should work. The current situation is very similar to instant messaging. It's fragemented and incompatible although all too similar. Imagine if emails were that way. If you had to sign up to a new provider each time you want to contact a friend on that network.