gregtyree.com

We have done so well with RSS and other aggregators (think FriendFeed) in making it easy to gather up the content we love – making consumption easy and on our terms (and within the software we choose).

But I keep finding areas where this just isn’t easy for those that contribute to the social.  My case in point would be restaurant reviews.  I have a few sites/apps that I use – Yelp, UrbanSpoon and MenuPages – and they all encourage and support reviews.  As I travel and look for feedback on new places to eat I would like to give back and share my experiences.  But in doing so I wind up adding my opinions and content to three different sites, making it difficult for me to step back and learn from that data.  I have to manage three separate accounts and if I want to pull up my favorites I can’t easily do that since they are spread out across the sites.

I can recall Marc Cantor going on about Microformats years ago and they have been widely implemented but this hasn’t prevented what naturally happens in a competitive space, that communities aren’t necessarily connected.  Clearly the technology exists to make sharing possible, but the nature of running a business means that most communities aren’t open.

Now we have several efforts underway through popular sites to make it easier to use the same credentials across numerous sites but this doesn’t fully address that your online identity isn’t portable.  In my example with restaurant reviews and votes I can’t visit one destination and see my library of reviews.  I hope that as the new generation of social sites mature that we go beyond just portable login and get into easily collecting our complete identity’s and contributions.