Social Networking Quagmire

Honestly, I am a bit swamped with requests to join various websites cultivating a Social Network via the Internet.

A couple of years ago, I was introduced to one such site called Ryze. Sometime last year, I joined the Orkut bandwagon. A few months back my tryst with Facebook started. And somewhere in between I got into Linkedin. There was an invite to join some other site and today, I saw an invite to join Yaari.

And you know the interesting part? I barely have one or two common threads on these sites. Another thing I noticed was that there is a clear demographic separation in terms of the people who invite me to these sites. Most of them are my friends from my previous employer and none of them has invited me on Orkut. They have invited me to join all other networks. Again, is that because they themselves don't belong to Orkut or is it because they don't like Orkut or is it because they don't like to link me on Orkut?

Whatever be the network, I don't think these are really meant for me. I am a bit of a reserved character and so, unless someone contacts me directly, it is highly unlikely that I'd visit these networks to get connected with the individuals. In fact, few people do comment regularly on my Orkut scrapbook and I duly get an email notification. Yet, I don't login promptly to find out what it is. I take my own sweet time to login and respond.

Having said that, I think these sites are useful at some level, coz it did help me to get back in touch with a long lost friend of mine in college. But its just that, I am not cut out to be an active participant on any one of these websites and am baffled by how I would stay in touch with my friends who are profiled in different websites.

So, would someone come up with a new website that would let you integrate all your profiles and present it to you in one site itself? This way I wouldn't have to check each of these sites to see if there are any updates from my friends. I can get the view in one single page itself. Probably someone has already prepared that website and I think I will wait for someone to invite me to that site as well!