For most people using the web on a regular basis, joining social networks has become an everyday activity. I’m certainly joining lots of them myself. When a new service sprouts up that sounds interesting, my curiosity gets the better of me and I dutifully go through the motions of signing up for it. The process goes like this: enter a username, choose a password, and in some cases even enter more personal information. After I do that, I go through the process of finding anybody on the service that I know. Chances are there are at least a few of my friends already using the service but I have no way of discovering them easily.

But then something interesting happens: I hit an invisible wall, tire of the service, and forget to go back. I call this phenomenon the Fade…as I slowly fade away from using the service regularly. And, days or weeks later when I realize that I’ve faded away from yet another service, it serves as a painful reminder that so much of my time is spent managing connections instead of enjoying being connected.

I’m not alone in this. This problem has become so widespread they even have a name for it: Social Network Fatigue (SNF):

n. Mental exhaustion and stress caused by creating and maintaining an excessive number of accounts on social networking sites.

What causes social network fatigue?

1. Repetitive motion: We do the same things over and over: create an account, add our favorite things to our profile, try to find friends, add some (but never all) friends, wait for something to happen. It’s a repetitive cycle that, when we realize we’re going through it yet again, reminds us that we’re not being productive, but repetitive.
2. Too many things to remember: After we sign up for a new network, we have to remember that we did and know how to get back there. If we do remember to check back, we have to remember the username and password that we used to create the account. With only a few accounts, this is easily done. But after you’ve joined a dozen or so social networks and the thought that you might want different passwords for some of them enters your mind, this becomes a real challenge.
3. Wasted time: With more and more social networks to manage, the time we have left to enjoy interacting with friends dwindles. The other morning I woke up, checked my social networks, and then realized that I had wasted 30 minutes simply managing my accounts, not really getting anything useful done.
4. Lack of consistency between networks: One of the biggest problems between social networks is that people we have signaled as friends on one network aren’t our friends on another. For example, my Facebook friends list isn’t even close to my LinkedIn contacts list, though both contain people who are important to me. This lack of consistency is incredibly frustrating, as it not only means more repetitive motion of friending them again, but it also makes us think twice about who is where.

The involved process of recreating our identities on multiple services leads to frustration and eventually exhaustion. Who knew that surfing the web could be so difficult?