With the purchase of my new iPhone and the reenabling of SMS messages, I’ve started getting back into serious social networking. You know, mobile Facebook updates, Brightkite, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. One of the things I really like about Facebook, Brightkite, and LinkedIn is that you can find friends from your contacts in GMail and other social networking services. I was able to find several friends on several of these networks by importing my contacts.
However, I’m pretty old school as far as “social networking” goes. I was there when AOL first released a stand alone IM client and ICQ was all the rage. Then came the latter entries of Jabber (GTalk for example) and MSN. By far most of my friends and contacts are on AIM. I don’t have email addresses or facebook profiles for them, so I can’t import them into the other social networking sites I’ve started using. This is a big bummer for me because as people change screennames, or quit using one protocol for another, I lose contact with them.
I’m thinking about finding or writing a plugin for one of the popular clients (Pidgin, Digsby, etc) that would allow you to put this information in and share it with your other instant messaging friends. Similar to what Off The Record (OTR) does when it initiates a conversation, you could send a specialized request that would automatically be answered with the information to import into Facebook or whatever social networking site you desire.
If you know of something like this, let me know so I can install it! Otherwise, post some comments on features and clients that should be supported for something like this.