No man may be an island, though I bet you could have made a good case for Robert Maxwell , but when it comes to data spread out amongst the 2.0 services we're at best an archipelago with a free ferry service between islands or at worst a gulag were your data can check in anytime it likes.....

In the real world I wouldn't bank on island 1, get the groceries on island 2, drink on island 3 , stop off to pick up a paper at island 4 just to make it back in time to take the kids to islands 11 and 23 for their respective sports. What's stupid and inefficient in the real world is just as stupid but because it's quicker to do online.

Let's kick this virtual crap to the side ( Until Gibson's or R K Morgan's visions are in place anyway) and get back to  consensual reality. 

One thing that would be nice as a standard is a content Guid , a personal 64bit number attached to anything you send out online. That's about 4.3 billion items prior to needing a reset which let's face it even the most ardent twitter fan would have worn their fingers down to the bone which is convenient as they would already be dead, downloaded or resleeved by the time that occurred.   That's just single items if you  coded the number to  be,    personalid:media type:  Date then    oh  you still have several million unique items in a year. 

Yet I get the Tom Baker ( WHO? )  voice in my head pirating a Douglas Adams line "The concept is simply staggering. Pointless, but staggering."

So I went to check.

After a quick chat at work with Steve , someone that knows enough about the topic to it sounds like my idea is as ever unformed, is already possible for the most part and what exactly am I trying to solve? 

Here's the problem. I have several services that collide on my Facebook profile. I use Seesmic, Twitter, Friendfeed and Iminta. When I post on seesmic , it tells twitter, both tell friendfeed and Iminta then all of these update in Facebook. Now while some of the fault is mine for setting up this cascade it's just a tiny part of the problem. There are now places people can comment on Seesmic, facebook,kinda on twitter,Friendfeed Friendfeed, Twitter and since my blog uses the same service there too.   

 I'm atypical re the number of services I am running. Most people , and by that I mean   people that are online and   have one main network   and gather   the other services they use under that umbrella
 
The problem is that many of the features that make social networks useful are replicated throughout and as time goes on  it's hard to see this not repeating over and over again. 

S/N ratio is the biggest issue we have to deal with and the people we pick to do that for us is going to be one of the key questions on the kind of web we weave.  That and ill conceived regulation to make it "neutral" 

 There's the set up.     Next post starts lobbing ideas