A little story:
Sunday evening, just finished Katrijn’s birthday party.   I open up my laptop and want to publish a few photos of our house and of the girls.

Question is : where?
I have a Windows live space, a LinkedIn account, a Plaxo account and a Facebook account, etc.
You can’t publish everywhere, right?

I’ve never had the ambition to be part of any of these networks, except for this space.  The only reasons I have an account on all the other networks is because someone invited me to look at their pictures.  Since you need an account to view other account, you need to create your own, etc.
Once you’ve created your profile, you’ll get invitations from all other people you may know on that network and the ball starts rolling. 

Funny thing: your connections are for a large part the same people that are also in your network with the other networks !

Sound familiar?

My opinion : it’s about time to get some interoperability between social networks.  I want to be able to publish with my tool of preference on my site of preference and still be able to connect with others that have another preference.
I don’t want to do this x times again!

Small chance this will happen in the near future : money makes the world turn round, and the benefits of a proprietary network seem bigger for the companies than having the most user friendly, open networking systems.
Perhaps Microsoft should simply buy all competition?? (that might be the fastest way to solve this ;-)

Conclusion of my personal dilemma: I went for my blog – at least that’s the network that I choose to be part of myself !