I was just thinking about how many technologies we have for sharing bits and pieces of our lives online, what it all means and where it might be headed. Just off the top of my head, here's a short list of them.

• Blogs, of course, are used as a chronological journal of news and commentary. They are a general-purpose publishing tool that can be used to publish information from various sources with embedded audio, video, and photos.
  
  
• Twitter is often referred to as microblogging. Many use it to record momentary glimpes of everyday life and fleeting thoughts, in 140 characters or less.
  
  
• Digg.com is used to share web links that you think are interesting. You can subscribe to friends' diggs.
  
  
• Netflix supports RSS publishing of your DVD queue so people can see what you'll be watching in the near future.
  
  
• Last.FM lets you publish what music you're listening to and in return you can see an aggregated view of what your friends and the world are listening to also. They were just bought by CBS.
  
  
• Flickr is one of the more popular sites for sharing your photos publically. You can subscribe to friends' photos with RSS.
  
  
• YouTube is the best known web site for sharing home video.
  
  
• Google Calendar, Upcoming.org, and 30 Boxes are popular sites for sharing your calendar with friends.
  
  
• del.icio.us is known best for sharing your bookmarks with the world.
  
  
• Share.opml.org is a geek-heavy site for sharing your OPML list, which is a list of your RSS feeds.
  
  
• The new feature on Google Maps called MyMaps can be used to share a collection of locations. A friend of mine who lives in London sent me a "MyMap" of her favorite restaurants in London, which will come in very handy the next time I visit.
  
  
• With 360voice.com, your Xbox can publish a blog for you! It writes about (what else?) your gaming activity and it talks about you like a dear old friend. Quite amusing. http://www.360voice.com/tag/Major%20Nelson
  
  
• Have a secret burden to share? Make a postcard and send it anonymously to PostSecret.com. It continues to one of the most popular sites on the web because, as you can imagine, they have very interesting content.
  

I'm sure there are many more examples like these. The technology industry is in another season of expansion (versus consolidation) and social applications are all the rage. and its seems that every day there is a new startup that enables the digitization and sharing of our lives.

I have three questions about all this: What hasn't been shared yet? What do these technologies really do for relationships? And where is all this going?

It seems like everything that can be shared has been, but if you think for a few minutes you can probably come up with more things. For example, I don't know why there isn't a popular web site where I can publish among my friends the items in my PVR queue. I am always thinking that I'm missing something on TV and I would like to see what my friends are watching.

I would like to know where my (guy) friends buy their clothes. This may sound strange, but it's purely practical, I promise. I don't like shopping at malls one bit, but I also like to dress decently. I'm totally content to follow the crowd when it comes to fashion, but I just don't know where to go!

Have you ever tried to search Google for a good credit card to sign up with? Pure crap. These are the kinds of things you really need to ask friends about -- contractors, babysitters, etc.

Does all this sharing help our relationships? I'm sure there are papers on the subject (I need to look that up) but I will speak from personal experience. On the good side, I once received a Twitter message (tweet) from a friend who was disappointed about not getting a job he interviewed for. I would not have known otherwise -- it's just not the sort of news you send in a mass email to people -- and I was able to call him and offer some encouragement. I've felt more connected to people who live far away. In fact, I've interacted more, through blogs, with my friend who moved to Hungary than I did before he left.

On the other hand, there are bad people in the world and we have to be careful what we publish so it's not used against us. My theory is that I'm flooding Google with the content that I have intended to be public. I'm controlling my internet image. There is also the argument that these "light" social interactions give us an illusion of connection and encourage shallow relationships. I've also found that there is less to conversation-starting material when I do see people in person. I start to tell them something and they stop me with "Oh yea, I already read that on your blog".

Where is all this going? That's THE question, isn't it? I think we'll see a consolidation of these technologies so the information isn't published to several different sites. The may already be happening. Here's what TechCrunch said recently about Facebook being a magnet for all social-based services:

The success of Facebook's Platform technology is motivating other social technologies to build on it. Although, I like having more control of my internet persona and I prefer to host my own custom page with links to the various places on the internet that I've published my life. This could be an area of opportunity -- a site that is the glue among the various places on the internet that you publish yourself to.

I also think we'll see more intelligence in how we manage our social networks. As I said in my previous post Friendlists are so 1997, our social relationships are much more complex than the way the are modeled in software today. For example, the company Grand Central, which is rumored to being acquired by Google soon, simplifies one's social life with regard to phone calls. They give you one phone number and you create rules that tell the system which friends have access to what numbers at what time of the day. This is the sort of intelligence that is needed with the rest of the information we publish on the web. Technology should help me direct information about me to the right people. Again, Facebook is well-poised to address this, but they're not the only game in town.

Tags: Social technology, social sharing, blogs, HP, HP Labs