Last week I was talking to a friend who brought up the online site called LinkedIn. It’s one of many sites that are part of the whole Web 2.0 landscape of today, which include popular sites like MySpace, Facebook, and others. My question is, when does it all get to be too much. A few years back I started to have the same problem with IM. At the time I had to decide if I wanted to be on MSN, Yahoo, or AOL. The end result is I decided to join all, but actively use none. It got to be too much until a few months ago when I found Trillion (Windows) and Adium (Mac). These applications allow me to combine MSN, Yahoo, and AOL (which includes .mac) IM id’s all into one application. Once I boot up Trillion or Adium I’m instantly logged into all 3. And all of you on the other side only see that I’m logged on to whatever you’re using. In the end, it works great.

I decided to register with LinkedIn to get an idea for the site. The site uses “connections” to show what MySpace calls “friends.”. And just like MySpace there are all sorts of people on there. You have the people who are full of themselves with hundreds, if not thousands, of connections. Then there are people with very few connections, either because they don’t have many in the first place or because they don’t care to advertise all of them to the world. Granted, these are just my opinons of the web.

In the end, I see the same thing happening to the Web 2.0 space that happened to IM. At some point, people are going to have to make a decision which site is most important for them to update. Either they’ll update one, spend countless hours attempting to update all, or will decide to rid themselves of the whole concept until an Adium or Trillian version comes along. For me, I have my info on MySpace and now LinkedIn, but I’ll stick to updating poulios.com on a regular basis with my small group of friends who read it and, in some cases, leave comments.