Following on from the last post on Commonality vs Compromise I started thinking about the integration of Web 2.0 apps. Currently there are a huge number of sites that overlap with functionality and whilst there are some dominant sites, there are also a lot of competing ones. This is traditionally seen as good for the consumer, as they have choice, but is also difficult if you want to maintain a single identity.
This used to be the situation with IM protocols: If you were on ICQ and I was AOL then there was no way for us to communicate- now applications allow you to create multiple protocols (you still need to log in and create the account) but that at least you no longer need to use 1 application per account.
So is this happening with Web 2.0? Sort of, I think. You can link from certain social sites to e.g. Flickr so that you don’t have to post your photos twice (on account of the fact that anything on Flickr should be viewable by all your friends, though the reverse may not be true) but this may be due to distinct functionality.
However, the main point is that I still have to enter a whole bunch of the same information on each site. So, if I want to choose the best of breed (which I do) and use Google’s Calendar with Yahoo’s RSS Reader I break the data principle of single data entry.
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