The overload of online social networks

During the past few months, I think everyone with at least a tiny bit of internet savvyness knows what an online social network is. From wikipedia's entry, this is defined as focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software.

All this mumbo jumbo is easily understood if I mention MySpace, Facebook, or any other from this list. The phenomenon has expanded to music, photography, among many other interests (some of them really weird).

So, as a tech savvy, I explore these sites from time to time, to check what's all the hype about... This resulted on having multiple profiles entered on different networks, with inconsistent information between them. And I hate having to update repeatedly all of them, instead of doing it just once. Heck, recently I even deleted my accounts on some networks, as my profile was so much out of date, that mainaining them didn't make any sense to me. Nevertheless, while some of this networks simply exist to make friends, or to browse disparately without a purpose, just to kill time (i.e., also known as deliberately lost in the hyperspace).

Despite this, I think that some networks really do have meritable purposes (from my point of view): I use Flickr to show some photos from my travels (typically when I go to conferences); LinkedIn as a socialnetwork-flavored curriculum vitae (you'll never know when to look for a new job); Facebook to get in touch with some overseas friends; and, lastly, Last.fm to find new music I might me interested (really cool network, I confess).

So, to lower the burden of updating all my information of each site, there should be a mechanism to lower this burden. Yes, I know that, in fact, each one provides its special features, allowing people to differentiate from each others. But a great deal of information is the same (e.g., profile info, user photos, commenting, partial friend networks, shout boxes, blog posts - you name it).

Why can't I perform this updates on a centralized way? This issue is similar as having to sign-in into each site with different username/password. OpenID delivered a solution to this identity authentication problem. (I've posted something about this before). Is this a new opportunity for this standard? Or to anyone else outhere?

Oh, and why do I have to keep checking each site, just to take a quick glance over the latest updates and info? Yes, I know that most of these sites rely on advertising programs to squeeze a buck or two. Nevertheless, I'm sure that a good solution can be found in between, thus making everyone happy. And since this is a blog about user experience, and I'm a user, I want to be happy. And I'm not happy at all with this... updating overload.

On a side note, I haven't resisted on fullfiling my profile at Digg. At least on this case, I still win something with this new network: interesting news will be pushed to me by my peers... Interesting, IMHO.