How do we pull all this social together?

I like the thought behind what Skittles.com is doing (using Twitter , Flickr , Facebook and YouTube as the content of their site), but it doesn't really work. Too fragmented of an experience, and really no value. But, like I said, I like the thought of it.

They are trying to figure out the problem that most everyone is trying to figure out. Not just companies and organizations. There are so many social networks to be involved in, where do you focus your time? So many of these social networks overlap with each other. Should Skittles put videos on YouTube, Flickr or Facebook? All of them? If they have decided to use YouTube for video, how do you tell the people looking at pictures over on Flickr or Facebook (where you chose not to put video) that you're using YouTube for video?

Now honestly, I have no idea why anyone is interested in watching videos or commercials of Skittles. Unless you can drop them in a bottle of diet coke and create some sort of fizzy explosion - personally I'm not interested. But I'm not really talking about Skittles here. I'm talking about all the companies that are trying to figure out how to use social media. With so many different sites you need to participate in, how do you unify that experience for the customer? Is there even a way to unify the experience?

It's the same for individuals. Do you make a snarky comment about the guy next to you on the bus on Facebook or Twitter? Do you use Ping.fm to send it to both? Are your friends the same on both networks? Mine aren't.

Do you post the pictures of your kids birthday party on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, or that one with a fish? Maybe you don't want the whole world to see, so what relatives and friends have joined with which site?

And if you're going to spend so much energy on these social networks, what do you put on your own site or blog? Friendfeed helps with this, but does not go far enough. Ideally, everyone would open the doors to their data so we could post most of this on our own sites. Instead of putting an annoying floating navigation widget on the top of everyone elses page, we would be able to pull in the information from those social networks better. There are small steps being made in this direction, but I doubt it will go all the way. The idea of the internet as the social network will never really come about unfortunately. So how do we piece it all together into on cohesive presentation?

I didn't write this post with any solution in mind.