Does anyone else think that social interfaces are become increasingly shambolic and over-engineered?

Or does the orgy of social media extensions, mash-ups, mishaps and mad hacks make you giddy with excitement, as you (deep breath please): push all of your real-time lifecasting content to 17 different wireless devices, as you merrily tweet about your new Wii Fit console while simultaneously videoing the entire euphoric mess, before uploading to it Revver (to ‘monetise your content’), then recut the entire video, remix it to Peaches, email the universe and finally publish a frame-by-frame Flickr photostream just for kicks.

Hmmm. Do I need a holiday? Am I just showing my age (35), or is the current feature-rich social interface hysteria simply a case of over-zealous web designers who are high on a cockatil of Wired covers, venture capital, digital media proliferation and increasingly ubiquitous broadband?

Is it a bit much? Do you secretly agree (but are just too afraid to admit it in case you’re iPhoned to death by gadget-wielding 19-year-olds)? Or should I shuffle off to the library and fall asleep in the Botany section for a nice quiet drool?

But I just can’t help feeling that it’s getting hard to find the content these days.

Consider any of the new start-ups that proudly don their wares each day on Mashable. Try one out. Once you’ve sifted through the beaming line-up of active members who’ve rated this page, edited this page, tagged this page, shared this page, embedded this page and generally frigged around with this page, it’s hard to find WTF this page was all about in the first place.

But don’t be alarmed, you can always submit your feedback, and discover that the page has been changed tomorrow, the UI completely reengineered (based, of course, on feedback) and rest assured that the page is not, in fact, a page anymore, but a new thing called a ‘Piki’ (I made that up). A Piki is actually a dynamic real-time aggregation of suggested changes to the page (before it was really published) based on the community’s view of how the page should really look. The page does not exist anymore. Pikis are where it’s at.

Or maybe I’m just a twitchy, territorial content person feeling affronted and threatened by the inevitable and unstoppable tide of user-generated content?

Or have we forgotten something? And that is, quite simply, that technology should not be a barrier to content. Or even: now here’s a crazy idea (thanks Adaptive Path), make content the interface. Gaming does this very well. So does (dare I say it) television. Or books (heretic!).

Anyway, I am being a wee bit cynical and facetious here (our hero loses any remaining credibility and falls haplessly into the fiery caverns of old media), in the vain hope that some meek soul at the back of the Internet might whisper quietly, ‘Psst … I’d like to see a bit more content too, please’.

I suspect there will be a swing back to content. I don’t think that making media more social will go away (I actually think it's a good thing to do). However, maybe we can find a way to do it a little more elegantly – I don’t know how this will manifest itself – but please don’t scream ‘SHARE ME NOW’ when I arrive at your site; we haven’t even met.

And that’s just not a polite way to start any conversation.