By Steve Schafer
Have you noticed that social networking seems to be heading more towards getting all the buzz out to everybody? These sites try to convince us that our coworkers want to hear about the raging party we went to last night, or our friends want to hear about the latest advancements in widget technology. They want us to believe that we can attain popular notoriety by constantly throwing posts at the wall to see what sticks.

Let's take a look at this theory. I have an account with a popular social networking site. Let's call it "Pace Brook". In my contacts, I have several personal friends, my fiance, my mom, and several "networking contacts". I go to my "wall" and in the morning and there are an average of 160 posts there waiting for me to peruse. Another of the sites to which I belong (we will call it "pwitter"), has even more "pweets". Unless I am going to spend the better part of my day going through them all, how do I sort out what I want to read and what I don't before starting my work day?

I don't exactly have an enormous list of contacts. Some of my friends have hundreds of people on their contacts list; if not thousands. Although there are a lot of people I would like to add to my list, what they offer in the way of useful content is nullified by excess noise they would contribute to my wall.

The other problem is that my friends don't really care about my latest blog post on the advantages of micro-niche marketing, and my coworkers don't really want to hear about how Jason ended the evening with a lampshade on his head. As a matter of fact, every single post that I send out will wind up on the wall of people that care about the topic and people that don't. The more "noise" I introduce to a segment of my contacts, the fewer of my posts to those people will get read.

This phenomenon is not at all uncommon. If you think having more contacts gets more of your posts read, statistically, it's the opposite. The more contacts you have, the more people will simply not care about what you are posting. That seems counter productive to me.

What about your "bio"? Personally, I have learned to put nothing more than the most generic bio descriptions for my social networking accounts. I just don't want to deal with people getting information about me that I don't want them to know. I could open multiple accounts with different bios for different purposes, but that seems to me to be a bit of a pain. I do, however, know quite a few people who have done just that.

So what do I propose? What if I had all of my contacts categorized for me, with a separate "wall" for each category? I could choose my "friends" wall and just see the posts by my friends. I can post to my "friends" wall and only those people will see it. I could even do a search for keywords and have a list of friends pop up that match that keyword and quickly post to all or some of them. Each category would have its own bio associated with it, so only my friends could see my "friends" bio, and only my coworkers could see my "coworkers" bio. All my friends could see the pictures of me being drunk and silly, without worrying about what my coworkers might think.

Since I am sending posts only to people that I want to read them, more people will actually read more of my posts. I can let my networking contacts know when I have a new blog post up, or ask my friends whats going on this weekend and know that the right people got the post.

What I want, in essence is a "buzz conduit". Something that will direct all the incoming buzz to the proper location, and the outgoing buzz to the people that I want it to reach. It would also be nice to have some of my privacy back.

While it seems that the web 2.0 giants are not likely to do anything like this any time soon, there is a site launching that will. It will enable you, me, and everybody else that wants to to have their very own buzz conduit. It will be called buzzduit.com, and it's being built as we speak.
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