It should be about people, not channels.

Social networking is failing me.

I use Twitter everyday. I love it dearly, and it has allowed me to get to know a lot of cool people that I would (in all likeliness) have never come across without it.

But the majority of my ‘in real life’ friends – the people I grew up with, the people I went to uni with – don’t use Twitter. Most of them are pretty active on Facebook – but Facebook really isn’t my thing. I can’t deal with the noise.

So I find myself in a situation where, thanks to a social networking tool mis-match between myself and my closest friends, I know nothing about what they are up to every day, and everything about the lives of people who I have never met. Seems a bit odd, doesn’t it?

Because even though social networking feels people-centric while we’re interacting with it, in reality it is channel-centric. You can only be friends with your friends if they play in the same channel as you. Even if you and your friends all spend the hours of the day on the internet, if you are not using the same tools you can pass each other by like two ships in the night.

In my mind this is really the main problem that the next generation of ’social networking’ tools need to solve. The emphasis needs to move away from the tools and onto the people - so I can keep up with my ‘IRL’ friends just as well as I can my digital acquaintances, without having to chain myself to a dozen social networking tools that i really have no interest in, just to cover all my bases.