Social Network Overload? SocialStream to the Rescue!

What do these social networks have in common? I have my profile on all of them (and many more like them), I have friends on all of them and I find it increasingly challenging to keep up. Not to mention all the spam from MySpace and other messages are clogging up my Inbox.

I am sure most of you are in the same boat. Few years ago it was multiple versions of Instant Messaging and now the same issue is with the social networks. As with IM, one doesn’t have all their friends and acquaintances loyal to a single service. To add to this nuisance there are services, which allow you to launch your own social network. Oh man… haven’t we had enough?

The blogosphere is calling this problem the “Social Network Overload“. Fred Wilson (The VC) and Jason Calacanis have even declared bankruptcy on social networks.

Is there no end in sight? Is there no light at end of the tunnel? Just like the consolidated IM applications like Trillian, Adium, Pidgin and VelvetPuffin (read my post about VP), is there no consolidated social network?

Enter SocialStream — Quite possibly the answer to our problems
SocialStream is a Google sponsored project at Carnegie Mellon whose goal is to rethink and reinvent social networking. Their approach is to deliver this rejuvenated experience by delivering a unified offering. Check out the demo video below:

Download the Hi Res Quicktime version
Although they don’t have a beta program open yet, browsing the site and the demo reveal some very interesting features. Let me try and enumerate some of them for you.

• Aggregated View
  • This one is obvious as SocialStream aggregates the following from various Social Network and Media services.
    • Contact information
    • Comments and Posts
    • User content
  • The service enables a bi-directional content access. This way any content posted on the service can be reflected on the original social service (based on user’s liking).
    • This is their broadcast mode where items like media can be posted to all configured external services.
• Timeline Visualization
  • This one is pretty neat as all friends post and new content is aligned on a timescale. This way the user does not have to scroll through mile long pages.

• New Content Alert
  • The service has special icons alerting the users if their friends have posted new content on their profile.
  • This avoids the user from having to view all their friends profiles to view new content.

• Share Contacts
  • On typical services one has to find friends, which could be a tedious process.
  • SocialStream has a neat feature where one can invite new friends to the service and at the same time identify common contacts
  • This way when the new user signs up he/she already has multiple friends in their contact list
    • I like this as it begins to bring LinkedIn like behaviors to common community experience
• IM integration
  • The contacts view is enabled for the user to launch their favorite IM application
  • This allows users to seamlessly switch over to real-time chat mode instead of going back and forth on the comment board

Frankly I am already quite impressed with what I have seen. Hopefully I can get access to their beta service soon. Also this is a school project as of now. I am seriously hoping that Google can adopt it going forward and enable this as their defacto social network offering instead of the plain vanilla orkut.

Send in your thoughts.