With the social media / Web 2.0 explosion, it seems like there are sites popping up all over the place offering individuals a chance to build an online profile. They make lots of promises - making new friends, finding old friends, sharing information, publishing media, promoting "free" and squashing any sense of privacy. Some sites, like Myspace, grew in popularity because they came at the right time and made it easy enough for the average user. Others fail to make waves because they offer nothing new.

The one thing that I've been noticing lately are a plethora of social networking sites that appear to be geared towards people who simply have nothing better to do. In the old days, we might have called these people "busy-bodies". The sites that cater to these users are very similar. They are basically blank databases that allow the user to populate tons of information and media about themselves and their likes/dislikes, and they expect the user to actively maintain their profile if they want to network themselves. But who has time to maintain profiles at a hundred different sites?

From the promotional standpoint of a band, we might be able to justify spending all day promoting our music if it ends up in a solid sales increase. But we have to be smart about it and decide which sites warrant frequent updates and which sites can act more like landing pages to send users to our band homepage. Unfortunately, setting up a profile and not maintaining it isn't going to impress people. Sure, it gives us another place on the net to spread our message, reinforce and our brand and provide a link back to our band homepage but visitors may be turned off by the fact that it hasn't been updated in several months. Our profile may also get blown away by site administrators if we don't update it in a long time. So how do we strike a balance?

The first approach is to include as much dynamic content as possible - content that is served from another location and updated simultaneously across all sites when we make any changes to it. Think of images that are stored on your own server and displayed using IMG tags on various other sites. You can upload a new image on your server with the same name, replacing the old one, and it will update across every site that remotely displays it. This makes it easy to update profile photos, background images, the latest show flyers and other theme images - assuming that the social networking site doesn't appropriate the image that you point to and host it from their own server (as is usually the case with profile pictures).

For textual content it is more difficult. Few social networking sites allow you to insert javascript or PHP into your profile which would allow you to update text remotely. However, there are sites like Feedburner that can take an RSS feed and create a widget of your text in the form of an animated GIF. Using this feature allows you to post news to your homepage blog and have it displayed as an image across your various social networking profiles.

Although we have several sites that appear to be at the top of the list right now, there are so many others that are no better or worse that competition will have more to do with what you are used to than which is really the "best". Cross platform offerings that allow us to make updates and manage profiles across many sites will likely be more popular, as opposed to yet another site that acts as an island. But few of these sites work well together. In the meantime, we at least have some useful widgets to try and quell our frustrations.