[From a Ryze posting: The Promise and Pitfalls of Social Networking, Stow Boyd in Darwin Magazine.]

Stowe gives substance to my complaint in my blog about Spoke: you can’t go inviting all your colleagues into multiple standalone social networking “services:”

“Like the world of instant messaging, the lack of interoperability between social networks has led to a fragmented and non-uniform market for social capital exploitation. It’s just too much work to upload your contacts into all the various mass-market social networking solutions, and actively participating in more than one or two of them would require too much care and feeding.

We are stuck at the Beta-versus-VHS fork in the road, where some company (or a few at the most) will break out of the pack with a winning business model, and establish a de facto standard for social networking, either as a monopoly (like Office) or through interface and protocol standards (like POP3 and SMTP). “

He goes on to say that the networking software must be integrated into the tools in which we live. I was surprised one day by Spoke, which has given me an extra toolbar in Outlook (as has LinkedIn). I wanted to search my contacts to verify the spelling of someone’s last name, and I searched the Spoke search by mistake. If my network had been large, it would have been very interesting to see what serendipity would have brought me!