UNTANGLED WEB?

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 204/14/2011

In my early teens I avidly consumed science-fiction short stories (particularly anthologies edited by Groff Conklin), and one that stuck in my mind was "A Subway Named Moebius", written in 1950 by US astronomer A.J. Deutsch. It concerned the New York subway system, which in some imagined future had been extended and extended until its connectivity exceeded some critical threshold, so that when a new line was opened a train full of passengers disappeared into the fourth dimension where it could be heard circulating but never arrived. The title is an allusion to the Moebius Strip, an object beloved of topologists which is twisted in such a way that it only has a single side.

I've been reminded of this story often in the last few years, as I joined more and more social networks and attempted to optimise the links between them all. My first, and still favourite, is Flickr to which I've been posting photos for five years now. When I created my own website I put a simple link to my Flickr pix on it, but that didn't feel enough. I soon discovered that Google Sites support photogalleries and so placed a feed from my Flickr photostream on a page of my site. Click on one of these pictures and you're whisked across to Flickr.

Then I joined Facebook, and obviously I had to put links to Flickr and to my own site in my profile there. I started my own blog and of course wanted to attract visitors to it, so I started putting its address, along with that of my website, in the signature at the bottom of all my emails. Again that didn't feel like enough, so I scoured the lists of widgets available on Blogger and discovered one that would enable me to put a miniature feed from my blog onto the home page of my website. Visitors could now click on a post and be whisked over to the blog, while blog readers could click a link to go to my website.   

Next along came LibraryThing, a bibliographic site that permits you to list your book collection, share and compare it with other users. You might think this would take months of data entry, but the site is cleverly designed and connected to the librarians' ISBN database, so merely entering "CONRAD DARKNESS" will find all the various editions of The Heart of Darkness, and a single click on the right one enters all its details. I put 800+ books up in a couple of free afternoons. It's an interesting site for bookworms, particularly to find out who else owns some little-read tome. I suppose it was inevitable that LibraryThing would do a deal with Facebook, so I could import part of my library list onto my Facebook page too. 

I've written a lot here recently about my addiction to Spotify, where I appear to have accumulated 76 public playlists containing over 1000 tracks: several friends are also users and we swap playlists occasionally. But then, you guessed it, Spotify did a deal with Facebook, which made it so easy (just press a button) that I couldn't resist. Now down the right-hand edge of my Spotify window appears a list of all my Facebook friends who are also on Spotify - including esteemed editor Barry Collins - and can just click one to hear their playlists.

There are now so many different routes to get from each area of online presence to the others that I've completely lost count, and the chains of links often leave me wondering quite where I've ended up. I haven't even mentioned LinkedIn, because it has so far  refrained from integrating with Facebook (though of course my profile there has links to my Flickr, blog and websites). And this is just the connectivity between my own various sites: there's a whole extra level of complexity concerning content, because just about every web page I visit offers buttons to share it with friends or to Facebook or wherever.

It's all starting to feel like "A Social Network Named Moebius" and I half expect that one day I'll click a link and be flipped into the fourth dimension, where everything becomes dimly visible as through frosted glass and no-one can hear me shouting. That's why my interest was piqued by Kevin Partner's Online Business column in this issue, where he mentions a service called about.me. This site simply offers you a single splash page (free of charge at the moment) onto which you can place buttons and links to all your various forms of web content, so a visitor to this single page can click onto any of them. Now I only need add "about.me/dick.pountain" to each email instead of a long list of blogs and sites. Easy-to-use tools let you design a reasonably attractive page and offer help submitting it to the search engines - ideally it should become the first hit for your name in Google. Built-in analytical tools keep track of visits, though whether it's increased my traffic I couldn't say - I use the page myself, in preference to a dozen Firefox shortcuts.

[Dick Pountain regrets the name "about.me" has a slightly embarassing Californian ring to it - but that's enough about him]