Being your friend is hard work

Overwhelmed by the amount of work necessary to keep up with all my friendships on Friendster, Orkut, and all the other social networking sites, I’ve posted a job opening over on craigslist for a personal social coordinator:

Permanent full-time position for a personal social coordinator for a New York-based web designer.

Your primary responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.

There’s even room to grow in the position:

Future duties may include discouraging companies and individuals from starting new social networking sites so that additional staff won’t be necessary in the future. Past employment as a bouncer, “heavy”, or hired goon may be helpful in this regard.

Or maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. Perhaps we just need a web service for managing relationships on the social networking sites. A meta Friendster; Micrsoft Passport for social networking. We could call it, oh, I don’t know, Metaster…or Sterster. Sign in to all the sites with one username and password. Invite metafriends to all the sites with a single click. Manage a single profile across all the sites.

Of course, the marketplace won’t be content with just one metaster site. Multiple sites will spring up and we’ll then require a metametaster site to manage the information in all the metaster sites. Of course, the marketplace won’t be content with just one metametaster site. Multiple sites will spring up and we’ll then require a metametametaster site to manage the information in all the metametaster sites. Of course, the marketplace won’t be content with just one metametametaster site. Multiple sites will spring up and we’ll then require a metametametametaster site to manage the information in all the metametametaster sites. Of course, the marketplace won’t be content with just one metametametametaster site…

(And yes, it’s turtles all the way down.)