Where do you want to go today? It’s today not anymore a question about the used operating system, it’s more about the social network you want to use. People talking about Web2.0 and all its benefits are for sure right that the navigation and user-friendliness improved already pretty much, but how does it help if I have to maintain a couple of these networks to stay tuned with my friends and colleagues around the world? I’m talking here about business social networks only, not mentioning facebook, orkut and what else appeared in the market the last years in terms of private social networking.

In regards of business related social networks LinkedIn is still the 1st worldwide and in Europe but it has less market dominance in Germany and in France. In Germany former Open-BC not called xing.com is the market leader, as for the French the prefer former viaduc, now called Viadeo. Both have links to the Asian market and especially a lot of contacts to China, but there is little to no mapping with the users you can find in LinkedIn. India has to many local idioms, common language is English, Indian business community can be found on LinkedIn. For private networking India and Brazil are the only two big countries using orkut, more or less unknown to the rest of the world.

LinkedIn announced that they want to kick off a German version by the end of 2008. It will be interesting to see if they will achieve to convince xing users to move to their platforms. As xing has the better price offer and a lot of their users having a paid account I would be surprised if LinkedIn can easily win the battle. Furthermore I believe it will all depend if LinkedIn will develop an interface to smoothly move the profiles from one platform to their own one.

This kind of interface is offered by the quite new platform konnects.com. This had the consequence that I was sending out a real “invitation mass bomb” last week. Funny side effect: my profile clicks exploded on both platforms: LinkedIn and xing.com, almost every invitee clicked on my invitation to have a look who the fancy geek might be, who sent them an invitation to a new social network …

I’m interested to see which social network will make it in the next months. Even though competition is good in general and that there should not be a monopole in this are, I’m getting bored by too many social networks and I strongly believe that I’m not the only one with this perception. The only way the platforms could solve the issue is by clear extension of their API’s and allowing cross-platform contact linking. But this feature does not be part of any of their business plans and strategies.

Plaxo.com is at least a platform (with reduced social networking functionality) but trying to bundle a lot of social networking components and one of their best feature is the synchronization of address books (Outlook, iCal(endar), Google, Yahoo, etc.). I tried to use it already from day one, but at the beginning it was as buggy as the other software tools claiming to offer perfect synchronization. The newest release from plaxo.com however works like charm. besides that they do offer only one-way synchronization from google mail to plaxo, the two-way synchronization works obviously without any issue for all the others platforms. You can even synchronize your twitter, pownce and jaiku accounts. Having talked to one of their developers the two-way synchronization towards google obviously still fails due to changing interface description with google. I believe that unclear interface definition will continue to cause challenges for all software developers in the future.

Average customers should not have to care about the cause of these challenges, hence we can only hope that all the competitors will implement interfaces to their competitors and that they will concentrate on winning the battle by better and new functions rather than growth of their customer data bases only. At least the may-be benefit of social networking is these days killed by too many applications and redundant maintenance of profiles. Excellent to confuse head hunters but with limit use for the individual user, and especially boring to the paying customer.

The need for a market consolidation is obvious. Unless it’s clear who will most probably make the game, we as end users will most probably have to continue to maintain several profiles, with all the mess we are aware of.

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