My wife forwarded me an email she received that was attributed to Tom Faulkner, publisher and managing editor of IHRIM Press. The email invited recipients to "an anti-social network:

"Announcing the launch of the first Virtual Anti-Social Network—all you have to do to is nothing:

• No log-ons


• No passwords


• No memberships


• Nothing to add to your favorites


• No need to create a phony profile


• No uploads or downloads


• No bothering your friends with unwanted invitations to join


• Guaranteed privacy: no one will know you’re not a member


• No chat rooms


• No blogs


• Works in any country


• You can stay disconnected and stress-free


• The Virtual Anti-Social Network doesn’t even have a cute name.

Jump on board the Virtual Anti-Social Network and stop all that unnecessary communication before it ever starts. All you have to do is nothing!"

The sentiment behind this joke, of course, is that people are feeling seriously burned out by the social networking phenomena. Forrester research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff call it "groundswell approach avoidance syndrome" in their book Groundswell. They define it as "anxiety at the thought of actually participating in social technologies, balanced by a similar anxiety at the thought of missing out."

This term, and Faulkner's email, express the fatigue we feel with social networks. After all, how many profiles do I need to maintain? Do I really have to create a different one for LinkedIn and Facebook and Digg and Delicious and....? I don't have that many personalities—my friends argue I barely have one—so why do I need a profile for each network? I'd rather create one profile one time. And I want to own my profile; I don't want the social network to own it. I own me, not Facebook!

So I heartily support what some of the players in the social networking world are trying to do with data portability and federated social networks. We need to emancipate our identities from the specific sites, and then federate with the networks to which we want to belong.

There is an application that lets you "import" LinkedIn network "friends" into Facebook. But it's simply a band-aid—and not a very good one at that, because you still need to "invite" your LinkedIn contacts into your Facebook network. At this point, Facebook doesn't even want to go as far as automatically adding them.

In an attempt to combat the problem, all of the big social networking sites are publishing application programming interfaces (APIs). In October 2007, Google announced OpenSocial, which defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. MySpace launched Data Availability, its data portability standard, on May 8. The next day, on its developer site, Facebook announced Facebook Connect, which "allows users to 'connect' their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site."

Not to be outdone, on May 12 Google announced Google Friend Connect. a service that "helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors...Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more." (There are more?)

Clearly, social networks are moving more quickly to open up. The question is whether they'll be able to do it before users finally succumb to social network fatigue.