There’s a great new plug-in for Wordpress blogs called Socialize-Me. It looks at the HTTP referer field and if it’s a social networking site that you’ve configured the plugin to recognize, it shows a link to your profile to whoever is visiting your site. A pretty simple yet powerful concept. It lets you extend your social network from the site the network is on out in to your own blog. Sounds to me like a pretty nifty way grow your network.

Installation is as easy as any other WP plugin. You simply copy the folder into your plugins folder, activate the plugin on your Wordpress dashboard, then just tell it your usernames for each profile you have. The content it adds doesn’t take your theming into consideration:

but after a little javascript and CSS hacking you can make it match:

I have it set up for Digg, Flickr, Pownce, Facebook and a few others:

And considering I’m not in high school, that’s probably a few too many…

We all know there’s a multitude of social networking sites out there. Some focus on customization, some on messaging, some on embedded applications.

Well there’s another nice one out there called Virb:

It focuses on music and sharing music with your friends. It also includes the standard messaging, photos, videos and music that the rest of these sites support. Heck, even digg has some basic social networking built-in, so why shouldn’t every other site too? Anyway, Virb is now pretty polished and with a little CSS action you can end up with a very nice looking profile:

The problem is that no one I know is using it. I currently have zero friends on Virb. I would love to transition my social network over to Virb, but there’s the ever present chicken or egg dilemma here. No one wants to switch to Virb, because no one they know is on it. You would need a mass exodus from another site in order for it to be useful and effective. I often wonder about the possibility of one-social-network-to-rule-them-all:

It would be able to handle messaging to and from heterogeneous sites, setting status and presence, integrating the previously uploaded photos, videos, and mp3s, and all the other common social networking functions. However, you would then need to give it your username and password for all the social networking sites you want to integrate. I don’t want to give FaceBook my email password to import contacts let alone all my social networking site account info:

So is this even an option? This type of site would endlessly need to add support for more and more social networking sites as they get created… unless of course, this site became the new site du jour. The thing is that if I don’t even want to give FaceBook my email password (even if I just gave it a temporary password and then changed it again), where does that leave us?

Update: Apparently, this is already in the works:

SuperSociety, a social networking technology firm, announced today its plans for adoption of a new service that will target existing social networks and communities, like FaceBook, Myspace, and YouTube, and link them together using a single login platform.

I signed up at SuperSociety to see for myself, but didn’t see anything like what was promised yet. I suppose time will tell…

It seems as if there are two groups of people out there: the netizens (people that are into the Internet and get what it’s about) and the straights (people who aren’t and don’t). Generally netizens are on the computer all the time and everyone else knows they are. They’re on Facebook, MySpace, or Pownce. They’re twittering or jaikuing. They’re tumbleloging. They’re AIMing or Windows Messaging. They’re all about status or presence:

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. There can be legit reasons for indicating status. Where I work, we have a product where everyone can see everyone else’s status:

Quite useful. The problem with the netizens though, is that their readers know everything. When they’re showering everyone knows about it. When they’re at work or at school everyone knows about it. When they’re on vacation everyone knows about it:

Now unless Mike made use of some sort of private registration for his domain, his home address is easily findable through a simple whois query (since ICANN requires you to use your address when registering). So now that big screen TV that Mike just blogged about may not be there when he returns from Italy.

So is this openness really a good thing? (Of course not! My TV is gone!)

Up until recent times, we have been fighting for online privacy, not online transparency. People have been using TOR to keep their packets’ source hidden. Now people are using del.icio.us and letting everyone know where they bank:

How much easier is social engineering now that all this information is made readily available?

About 10 years ago, I was in a band with a friend of mine. We had recently acquired a new drummer (good drummers were always hard to find) and a lady drummer no less. Since we had a new member, we put her picture up on our band’s website next to ours. That’s what you do when you’re in a band. Well, her father found out about this and told me (while red in the face) that I had to take her picture off. He was concerned that someone would see her on our website and be able to find her. While he was trying to be a good father, he was simply misinformed. There were no last names, no addresses, no contact info or way to find her at all. The site was hosted on my Purdue account at the time, so the site was even in a different time zone from his daughter. No one would have been able to find her, but the Internet was still new in that day and people were still frightened of it. Anyway, my point is that he didn’t want even her picture on the Internet. Now everyone on MySpace and Facebook is posting all that and more.

So the question is are the straights inherently more secure than the netizens?

In listening to Net @ Nite episodes, I found out about the latest and greatest social networking site: Pownce (pronounced pounce). It’s the new and improved FaceBook which is of course the new and improved MySpace. Pownce is invite only to avoid the huge onslaught of registrations, but you can always get around that.

Pownce is interesting because you can post text, links, files, and events. The files is especially interesting:

You can post mp3s and other DMCA friendly sorts of things. Only your friends can see these posts so it’s not globally exposed, so that helps the situation a little. Only time will tell what happens with that.