My social life has been pretty simple.  I have always kept 33 charts as my home base with Twitter as my main outpost. I flirt with Facebook.  All of it’s been manageable.

But consider that I now participate in a SocialCast stream with an emerging research project at the University of Cincinnati Medical School. Doximity has a mobile product that’s about to pop and Sermo just released its new mobile application.

Enter Google+.  All this has me wondering, ‘how many places can you live?‘

I’ve become increasingly pragmatic in how I see these tools.  I find myself looking less for community and more for the right information amidst a a cacophony of independent broadcasters.  I’ve become preoccupied with fighting digital noise.  It seems I spend most of my time looking for the right signal.

If I’m alone it won’t be for long.  I think Google+ represents the first time the public has experienced real fragmentation.  It’s the first real challenge to social media’s first major players. It’s an experiment than we’ve ever seen and the results will tell us a lot about what people really need and want.  Social media will make its move beyond novelty to a place for real communication.

And pay no attention to social media’s most visible acolytes who predicted during G+’s first week that it would evolve as the dominant social place. Remember that they love everything shiny and new.  But when the dust settles we’ll see who’s in and how the platform really makes their lives better.

Despite how it may look, nobody can live everywhere.