A "Social Meta Network" Site

Data portability is a good thing, I guess, but it does not immediately solve my issue: I'm sick of entering and maintaining my personal data on about a dozen sites.

The solution: A site that reads my information from any one site (or from my openid) and maintains it on all the others. That way I would only need to maintain one profile, say the one on Linkedin, and the software would update all the others. Or, I could edit my profile on my meta site directly.

My meta site would also show me news and information about all the contacts I have across all social networks (a bit like spokeo.com), and it has to be able to understand that some people have multiple accounts (e.g. via a merge feature like the one in pidgin).

Wouldn't that be a pip?

A "Social Search Engine"

A social search engine would work like this: enter the name of someone you know and press enter. The engine then goes through all the hip web 2.0 social networks and looks for a person with that name. In the end, you will get a list of blogs, accounts on Facebook, MySpace and the like, twitter feeds, and so on.

Why would I want that?

I am sure a lot of my friends are using social sites in ways that I don't know about. And I would potentially like to know what they are up to.

So whenever I find someone on Linkedin, I would also use the social search engine to see whether she is active in any other place as well.

Of course, the next step would be a tool that searches all my address books every now and again in order to find friends automatically.

Update: Just found something on Guy Kawasaki's twitter feed: Spokeo seems to do some of the above...

Update: data portability is now the next big buzzword, and all the big social sites have jumped on the bandwaggon. We'll see how far it all goes... check dataportability.org for more information.