The landscape of social media is a hall of mirrors. There are so many services that I’m on, and they all seem to conflict or collide with partial fits, all have different audiences, it’s terribly confusing. So far I’m registered with these providers:

• WordPress.com
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Tumblr
• Posterous
• FourSquare
• Ping.FM
• Instagram

So far I’m approaching these services as individual pockets of social engagement. I really need to decide what I am going to put on each of these services. The trouble comes when you find that all these services have in some limited ways cross-linking. It seems like a waste to share to each of these services but there is an in-built concern that if you close a service you are somehow cutting off real audience or potential audience. If a service is free, then why not use it?

There are some services that definitely are built for certain things. WordPress is great for really long-form blogging. Twitter is great for short-status-update messaging and link-sharing, Facebook has an odd blend of every service – using Notes for long-form blogging, using status updates for short-status-updates, plus all the picture and video hosting you could want which pretty much marks off the next two… Posterous and Tumblr. They kind of float in the nether-space outside of the previous three. Instagram is bound tightly with its iOS App, so it is social but only tangentially so and Ping.FM is more of a tool than an actual destination, so the tangent gets even further out.

WordPress publicizes to Facebook and Twitter, Facebook can be linked from WordPress and Twitter and Twitter itself? Anything can be linked to and from that service. In many ways it comes down (at least for the big three) a matter of audience. There are friends and family on Facebook who aren’t on Twitter, there are people on Twitter that aren’t on Facebook, but since WordPress publicizes to both platforms, it’s the equal opportunity platform.

I suppose my feeling of waste really comes down to Posterous and Tumblr. They seem like utter duplicates of each other. I can’t really say that placing content on either service adds any value, it’s just easy to crosslink them to all the others. Even when it comes to drop-in-one-place-spread-everywhere the two of them are almost identical. Each service champions what they provide, but even still, there is almost no information on why someone would choose Posterous over Tumblr, or Twitter for that matter, when you factor in all the “helper” sites such as TwitLonger, yFrog, and all of those.

There is a part of me that wants to crisscross Twitter and Facebook, but even there I’m conflicted. Not everyone on Facebook would appreciate the “nuclear follow cost” that my Twitter stream commands. I’ve kind of left Facebook to be a destination-dump for all the other services to send to. FourSquare sends to Facebook, WordPress sends to Facebook, as well as all the others except Twitter.

I think this entire segment needs to undergo a consolidation event, where a few winners are selected and their usefulness is clear to see and different from all the others. In the meantime, those that follow me have grown used to how I share information so I presume that maintaining the status quo will keep the boat afloat. I just wish there was a clear reason to select one over the other and resolve this tangle of odd duplication.