I love social media. I love what it’s allowed us to do for both this blog and Arment Dietrich. I love the people I’ve met and the people I’ve hired because of it. I love nearly everything about it, except…the social networks copying each other is driving me crazy.

First, Facebook took a stab at my beloved Pinterest with Collections (and then removed it for further testing).

Last week Google+ introduced communities. Great. So now I have to go to both Facebook and Google+ to talk to the same people I talk to in private groups on Facebook.

Now it’s rumored Twitter is going to release photo filters before Christmas. Now I can’t post my Instagram photos to Twitter, but have to use an entirely different app to do that.

It’s as though they’re each sitting in their board meetings saying, “How can we get everyone to use our site instead of our competitor’s sites?”

I get it. I do. I want clients to hire us instead of our competitors. But we’re not trying to be all things to all people. What happened to specializing?

Putting my cynicism aside (I clearly need some time off of work), it is valuable to look at what both Communities and Twitter photos bring. (more…)