Social networks don’t talk with each other. They fight with each other. They’re not connecting to each other because they want to. They’re connecting with the bare minimum because they have to. With customers at the center of the product you think social networks would keep them in mind.

Let’s face it: you’re not leaving Twitter for Facebook or Facebook for LinkedIn. We all already did the social network solidification dance from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook. Now social networks each serve a very distinct purpose. In the near future they won’t. That’s exactly what social networks are afraid of and why they won’t talk with each other – solidification and redundancy.

I’m not concerned with that right now. As a consumer I’m concerned about time and efficiency, which I’m not getting. I need social networks to understand that I am @db on Twitter and /damienbasile on Facebook. Mainly what I need is for Facebook to be able to parse users Twitter @names into real linked Facebook names automatically. This is why I use Yakket on Facebook to filter out all Twitter messages with @names in them when sending them to Facebook.

People are sharing across multiple social networks at once nowadays. I can send a message from Foursquare to Twitter to Facebook & Linkedin. That’s just one message. I may be on multiple networks but if I’m optimizing my time to post across them all then these networks need to recognize who I am across every one.

Another way how they’re not speaking with each other: rich multimedia. I often post messages in Facebook that I’ve already shared in Twitter simply because links don’t expand to show an image with a blurb like they do natively in Facebook. Facebook is all about the experience. If I see an update with some words and just a plain link I’m most likely going to ‘next’ it. No, in fact I AM going to ‘next’ it.

Eventually I see one thing happening. The social web will become more of a web. You, your identity and your relationships and how they translate & relate will move to front and center. Social networks will feel more like channels that you can change to see what’s playing on another one. I could be wrong but I already am seeing more and more cross network chatter. It’s only a matter of time before this issue comes to a head.