The early, heavy-use adopters of web 2.0 social networking sites, such as FaceBook, Bebo, and Twitter, have found they are on the bleeding edge of something else… online account overload. Memory is fleeting, and doing the smart method of a different password for each account leads many to routinely request a password reset (anyone smiling now has already joined the club!). And that’s just for the accounts that people remember having. Perhaps this is part of why social networking per-user usage is down.

A recent poster lamented that he has “8 e-mail IDs in different domains, 5 social networking profiles, 2 business networking profiles, 2 blogging accounts and a second life. All this fails to keep me interested and engaged…”, and unfortunately this is more becoming the norm for a plugged-in online person. Add in dating sites, job search sites, workplace logins, and semi-throwaway accounts you set up to gain access to news or a free report, and 20 to perhaps 30 logins are in the mix. The killer app for a successful social platform may simply be centralized identity management.

A post about collapsing online user accounts would not be complete without including OpenID. With support for this cross-site id-sharing capability growing, the hope is that those that dove into the last year or two with lots of accounts may end this year (2008) with more accounts, but less logins to remember.

Of course, that still leaves us with more friends and groups to join, and remember. And that’s not to mention the ever-increasing hoard of new social invites and friend requests that keep coming our way.

Given that the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, stopped using Facebook this month due partially to friending-overload, having fewer ids won’t stop us from having fewer friends. Decades ago we broke through the sound barrier, and perhaps are now enabled to reach and then exceed the limits of our human capability to socialize. Well, not yet, since mobile-enabled & other methods to socialize-on-the-go are still emerging in the drive towards continuous connected real-time socializing. Just stop typing while you relax & enjoy that dessert with friends.

The conference happened last week in Paris, France - LeWeb3 - and it produced a continuation of the sense that Social Networking is taking over the planet.

Some of the stories on the event are so far the first raw writeups of people fresh from hours of new media discussions.  There are also many announcements, such as one that is somewhat platform-related regarding NetVibes’ announcing Ginger, a network of social widgets.

There might be a few good ideas that turn up in reading this web 3.0 conference write-up.

The web 2.0 catchphrase has been causing people to forecast when web 3.0 will happen. Also organizations are now hopping on to try to be the *first* ones to be working on web 3.0.

But the integration of the technical web with the social web lead to the platform integration being key.