Offline, we share different sorts of things with different groups of friends in different physical places, but online it’s difficult to understand which people are on which sites and which of our contacts see which pieces of content. Furthermore, there are multiple sites where we have to add new acquaintances as friends or remove old ones when relationships change, and it’s tedious for us to re-establish the appropriate portion of our social networks on each new web site that we want to try. Wanderli.st will provide us with the tools to define and leverage our real-wold social contexts online.

Wanderli.st will be a web-based contact management system that synchronizes our ‘friends’ lists on both new and familiar web sites. It will serve as a layer between currently-unconnected applications on the social web, linking our existing online address books (such as Google Contacts) with the myriad sites on which we share content (such as Twitter and Foursquare). Wanderli.st will provide us with an intuitive and rewarding interface for organizing our existing contacts into a set of manageable, custom groups. It will use our contacts’ email addresses to find them on the sites where we are already active, and might then, for example, show us those contacts that we have classified as ‘coworkers’ that also have Twitter accounts that we’re not currently following but perhaps should be following.

We will also be able to make selections from those custom groups and associate them with different sites – Foursquare might be assigned everyone who is in either the ’school’ or ‘family’ groups except those people who are also in the ‘coworkers’ group, and then Wanderli.st can automatically send friend requests to those people on our behalf using Foursquare’s API. Later, if we make a change to one of our groups, Wanderli.st will automatically synchronize that change on each relevant website. In this way, Wanderli.st will both lower the barrier to entry that we face when trying out a new social website, and will decrease the effort required to keep our social networks synchronized across web sites.

Wanderli.st will enable social web sites to focus on our experience as users and it will unshackle us from redundant management of our social networks, leaving us free to socialize however and wherever we like.