How many profiles must a (wo)man write down...

Social networking and communities are so "in" these days. Gone are days when one complained about multiple IM contacts and enviroments, and the desperate aim to link them together in one single interface. Welcome to the new world of chaos, and following events and people around like a stalker in the making.

The rate that tools and communities are exploding is making even myself dizzy. I created a thought provoking quiz to make us realize where we are with respect to this craziness. It is all for humor, so take it that way. Please take the following quiz to find how popular you are, shall we start?

Count the number of times you answer "yes" to the following questions.

• Are you a member of Facebook? Were you an early user of Facebook and recruited other friends to create specialized groups?

• Do you have your linkedin profile? Was one of your old-time buddies involved in linkein early on and get you connected right away? Does your profile get regular hits from 10 people a week?

• But how about these Plaxo friends? My God, do you have a profile there? Wait, hang on. Your buddies from Microsoft want you to be part of the Microsoft Live network. Did you forget to sign in there? Haven't you forgotten to register with Spock, get your glorious ratings also in Namyz? But, your "professional profile" and contacts are in Linkedin and you have some hefty reviews of your ah-so-glamorous professional accomplishments. How about your Flickr buddies and your groups and your interests? Did you post your latest and greatest photos that show what an artistic one you are on flickr? Maybe picassa?

• Of course, you discovered twitter, haven't you? Aren't some of your contacts on twitter? Do you retweet snippets of wisdoms from famous people in twitter?

• How about FriendFeed? Maybe you prefer laconi.ca, or thinking how grouping functionality may benefit for those secret and private conversations on yammer? Yes, you think you are probably popular, right?. Ah, wait. Since you are so so glamorous, there are new social networking tools and their product managers are so eager to talk to you. They start sending you email messages and reports so often with the diminishing hope that their companies tool may be the next "enterprise 2.0 solution"? In the meantime, did you get a your dopplr account? Did you broadcast in your next trip just to make your budget-cut-grounded friends at other companies envy? But, they want to see you anyway, since you are coming their way. Is someone broadcasting your twitter statistics to your colleagues?

• Is there a nagging feeling in your stomach that "big brother is watching you" and probably someone is creating a "stalker 2.0" or "housethief 2.0" app based on your online and so public activity?

• Do you know how to link your facebook, dopplr, flickr, twitter, .... accounts all together so people can see everywhere how intelligent, artistic, wonderfully connected and smart you are?

• Do you broadcast to the world where you are using your coordinates and utter a smart thought for the day?

• Are you beginning to get connection requests from people with whom you have nothing in common and they look awfully suspicious to you?

• Has your company installed an internal social networking tool and "encouraging" you to use it? Are you one of the early adapters? Do you feel compelled to participate because your companies executives started to appear in the chats? Do you see all your contacts who were silent all of a sudden become extraverted?

• Does your company experiment with several of these beasts internally? Do you participate in more than one? Are they fighing among themselves to be the next "enterprise 2.0" breakthrough product?

• Are you part of a community in your company which is externally visible? Does your company have multiple communities? Do you belong to all of them? Do you have a separate profile for each? Do you feel you are out of touch when you do not post to these communities at least twice a week?

• Do you feel compelled to microblog every day? Every hour? Do you tweet during the family vacation while you are taking a boat ride on the ocean?

• Do you wish that just like the good old emacs days, someone will come up with a universal interface to all this "activity" and allow you to look at only a subset of them instead of opening up all these tools, multiple twhirl windows, web pages, etc? Don't you wish Facebook and the next "Enterprise 2.0 wanna be" thingy merged to be the single interface to save you some time?

• Do you wish you can share a single profile with all these environments? Surely, one can import your social graph from one another, but anyone who knows about unsynced replication will tell you that one of them will get stale. Of course, it is in each products benefit to be the owner of your social network, or portion of it. However don't you feel that you own the entire social graph as a user and you are just lending a piece to one of these tools, not the other way around?
  
  Until a single integration interface which allows you to "export" (not import from one another) and expand subsets of your social network based on utility/function comes along, are you afraid that you will have to continue to replicate your data, who you are, and also your so called profile from one place to another? In the meantime, do you wonder why you are not getting any real work done? Aren't you sick of typing where you went to school for the nth time? Or who your favorite rock band is? Or where you live? Or your supposed birthday? Don't you wish someone could also replicate it, but you do not have to import it from one environment to the other?

• Are you developing another networking tool because all of the others just suck or you feel they are just crap? Are you in a team that develops such a tool to change the world?
  
  

The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind...

Now, count the number of positive, "yes", answers to the questions. You belong to one of these categories:


Social Butterfly: 80-100% yes answers

Congratulations. You are a social networking butterfly. You are probably the reason why Right Said Fred wrote a song, because you are absolutely too-sexy for your keyboard. You can not keep up with your social life and it is making you absolutely crazy, but you will never admit it to your friends. You have 200+ contacts in linkedin and facebook. You are trying to make it grown even larger every day. You appear to do work, but you worry how you will brand and portray yourself in this distributed network of yourself and wonder everyday whether you left something inconsistent. You appear to do work, but it is getting harder everyday as your colleagues and your boss has just connected to you in Facebook.

Desperately-Seeking-Meaningful-Connection 60%-80% yes answers

You are using social networking tools but still have the hope that they will fill a void in your life by not making you question why you do not know your next door neighbors, or why you have not really seen your best friend for a week (online chatting does not count, of course). You have a sense that this is all useful, but afraid that it may be getting out of hand. It is nice that you discovered your college friend Mike online, who knows you may be better friends now. Organizing all these photos and posting them online is becoming a chore. Further, you really do not like other people know what you think that much, but have a deep suspicion that you may actually like being recognized as an expert if you were to tweet more. You really wonder how Guy Kawasaki does it and finds all this time. Your best friends are on all the social networking sites you subscribe too. However, getting on their calender to go out to a simple dinner is a daunting task since everyone is so sooo busy these days. You secretly wish for more time.

Naively-Optimistic: 40% -60% yes answers

You discovered the online communities and tools! Wow. Aren't you excited that technology can be used this way. You are connected in a very new way. You spend more and more time to increase your friends and connections. You just discovered your old friend Fred is now in Alaska. Wouldn't be fun to go and visit him? You started a new community for reverse-knitting practices with the hope that you may find and meet new people. You are watching many people and your connections online, but your activity is not upto par yet. You are happy to expand your horizons and think that by being in a community, somehow your life is going to become more meaningful and you will finally connect with people like you. You are out to change yourself and the world. Here you come!

Too-Private-or-Suspicious-for-good: 0-20% yes answers

You are deeply suspicious that people are out to get you and collect information about you. You may be a hermit, but do not want to admit it. After all, you do not know who is reading what you are doing. You do not like to let others know what you think. That wiki thing came along and required you put words and publish them online, but you only like to write carefully crafted messages to those you want to impress. Let alone, being recorded from here to eternity gives you a chill. You would not want your colleagues to see that you were a zombie commander in Facebook, or your fishing buddies know that you have a red latex nightgown fetish. No sir. You have an account on some of the tools, but everything is set not to reveal who you are or your "friends". You follow what people are doing at twitter, but never ever post anything so that it will be related to you later in life. You hate the fact that your old classmate Stan found you online and now insists on connecting in Facebook. You never liked him, why now. After all, he may show up at your door in Alaska. That would not be good!