Fleck: More Social Sprawl

Fleck.com - Users, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I think that Fleck is too sprawling — overlaps too many areas with other well-established tools — for me to use it. It is a URL shortener, and so I think of it as an alternative for Bit.ly. But then I logged in, and see that it is a bookmark tool — collides with Delicious — and has a social network built in! Yikes.

There should be a term for this: when a tool startles you by it’s overly ambitious aspirations, especially by sneakily introducing yet-another-social-network. How about we call it Social Sprawl: tools that feel like strip malls at edge city because they all have the same handles. I only want a dozen social networks, or so, not a thousand.