Great post by Josh Cotone over at ReadWriteWeb that covers a recent effort to visualize the Social Web by Andrew Shuttleworth. The map he created must be seen to be believed.
Here’s an excerpt of the post:
“Data portability will allow users to theoretically mashup and interact with all of their social media information from a single place. While that won’t cut down the number of sites and services tugging at our attention, it does promise to make managing that attention vastly easier. Shuttleworth points to services like Profilactic and Plaxo Pulse that are already attempting to bring our online social lives under a single umbrella.”
I highly recommend checking out the full post along with the map. Way cool.
Also, not surprisingly, I recommend also Andrew’s original post!
Additional commentary here.
The Real McCrea 
I think both the map and Andrew are AMAZING! Really please this has created a discussion and meme.
[…] only in our heads. His original article, and the ReadWriteWeb article has started a bit of a meme on the Internet. Why ARE we knocking ourselves out signing up for all these services? Is it really […]
Thanks for the comments John. Just one note – the map only tries to visualize a specific example of one user’s (i.e. my) social web – not ‘the Social Web’. I am a bit of a social media junky though so it is quite a comprehensive picture though 🙂 (Just want to make sure readers have the right expectations). When I’m getting it close to complete I may also try to create a template so that anyone can create their own map. The people at MindJet, developers of the MindManager software I used for the map, have shown an interest in it so perhaps they will be able to help.
You’ll notice that the Plaxo Pulse widget has prominent placement on the sidebar of my site … and I don’t give up that space easily. It is doing a great job. Would be nice if people could subscribe to an RSS feed of the Pulse direct from the widget.
As an aside, I’m a big Plaxo fan and was interested myself to look back on what I was writing about Plaxo in March and May of 2007.
Contact Management – The next big thing
“I think the only company in the best position to really become a huge player in this field is Plaxo …… A universal sync solution is necessary and Plaxo is the only company I see that is in a position to offer this. Come on Plaxo!”
Plaxo going from strength to strength
… a Bunch of Interesting Sites
“They are making moves into the SNS space, but I think they will stick to their strengths and allow people to maintain and share their own information. I guess you could call this semi-distributed contact management. What they really need now is to start adding fields so that people can add their own IDs on SNS systems to their contact information. They have started this in a limited way but few of the major SNS services (such as LinkedIn, Xing and Facebook) are supported.”
Regarding this last comment – I still really would like to see additional fields so that I can see or add the web profiles of contacts on other services.
Thanks for sharing more, Andrew. And, yes, definitely important for folks to realize that this is not a map of the social web, but rather one corner of the social web — yours!
Also, stay tuned, we are definitely planning to add more sites and give users more ways to aggregate their various profiles…