I've stopped accepting requests to join new social networks. I can barely keep up with one, much less 10. More to the point, I don't want to have silo'd data repositories. It's this last point that keeps me grounded in e-mail.
Sure, we now have OpenID to provide a central clearing house for identity online, but what I really want is to be able to send a Facebook message and have it show up in my e-mail, or somewhere central that I routinely use. I've come to accept that my IM client will be separate from my e-mail client, but I'm not prepared to add a Facebook "client," LinkedIn "client," etc.
Is there something out there to collect and coalesce my social communication? Is anyone providing a central repository for my online communications? If so, sign me up. I'd actually use Facebook if the things I did there were portable to my e-mail client, which was portable to my Flickr activity, which was...you get the idea.
Because each of these social applications forces me to live inside it, rather than connecting to other applications and storing the resulting communication data between them all, I use them sparingly or not at all. This is, I think, what Tim O'Reilly is getting at when he describes the social network as infrastructure rather than applications.
Will someone fix this, please? I think there's a lot of money in being that social network data repository. Heck, if Exchange weren't so creaky, Microsoft should be doing this.