How Many Networks?

I have been extremely busy with Mondus, so I have not been blogging much, but this post by Jon Udell is too important to pass up.  Udell's post and the comments he receives provide a good discussion on the meme that is now very established:  the difficulty of attaining critical mass on social networks, especially in the US market. He summarizes the whole discussion with the following:

Increasingly I’ve begun to feel the same way about the various social networks. How many networks can one person join? How many different identities can one person sanely manage? How many different tagging or photo-uploading or friending protocols can one person deal with?

Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”

This discussion is critical both for the internet industry, and, on a much smaller scale, me.  I am keenly following it.