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Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008?
blogdig writes "Managing scattered online Social Life on multiple Social Networking sites, I sense, will become a Killer App Category 2008. There are several startups now in the "Social Network Aggregation" space and this App Category should diversify and catch momentum in 2008. Some startups are focusing on identity consolidation, others on messaging consolidation and on tracking friends. Some like Profilefly offer consolidation of multiple things like Profiles, Contacts and Bookmarks....The need for users to be a member of not just one but multiple social networks can be understood through Barry Wellman's concept of 'networked individualism'..." Unfortunately the most important use of these applications won't be seen for some time. I refer of course to using my warlock to murder the ongoing stream of hot girls who want to be my friend on these sites.
My initial thoughts on this were "bah, people spend too much time online", then I caught myself realizing that in the aggregate, I have resources spread all over a number of services from the personal personal to the professional with various sites from scientific ones to educational ones to time wasters like Slashdot ;-)
I even started exploring a couple of social aggregators last year to explore options for consolidating effort and one of the most promising I've seen is Lijit. The premise behind their product is that people tend to look for answers from others they know or trust, yet current search engines (even the almighty Google) do not provide any sort of framework for trust inside social networks you are familiar with. Lijit provides for this intimacy of information allowing you and others to search not only information in your blog, but also information from posts that colleagues, friends and family have perhaps written when you are looking for information from sources that *you* know and trust. It is an approach that certainly has benefits in the social networking arenas, but I also find the potential for business and academics to be very exciting. The only question in my mind is how to exploit different services hosted on a variety of platforms to make the content indexable, but since text strings lend themselves to this quite nicely, the next problem is alternative data sources like image data, sound data, video, etc...etc...etc...
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I think social networking sites are going to gain and then lose a lot of momentum, maybe not over the next year but over the next decade we'll soon see that social networking sites are going the way of the MUD.
I don't want to manage a social networking site let alone have an app that collects all the data and sends it to multiple sites at once.
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It looks like someone has forgotten the links to the referenced pdf. You can find Barry Wellman's publications including content about Networked Individualism here.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I wholeheartedly agree that the first startup to get profile aggregation and contact management right will solve many power-user's frustrations with multiple profiles. However, I am not sure if this will be the universal killer app that people believe it to be. At this time, myself and many of my friends have profiles on multiple networks but each one caters to a different audience. My LinkedIn profile is for professional contacts, my Facebook is largely for keeping in touch with select college friends and family, and Friendster and Myspace are for everyone else. I don't necessarily want the same level of personal information available on every site. I would however like a way to group each person's multiple profiles under their name and be able to extract relevant contact information for synchronization into my mobile phone via Outlook.
Maybe this idea can be taken further. Is there an open framework where I can create a personal profile on my own server or free hosting service and link to my friends profiles a la Jabber's open model but for the social scene? Could this service provide a comment space, photo sharing, private messaging (via email), and RSS feeds via a shared application API? It seems like this would be very easily to implement if Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Hi5, and Bebo decided to open their networks to non-local hosted profiles and take the data from your profile and display it using their service's user interface. SPAM and privacy controls would have to be implemented but it would be as simple as: "If you would like to link your profile into the Facebook network please verify your profile via OpenID/OpenID2, email address, or mobile phone number." Granular privacy controls could be implemented by allowed users to group their friends profiles based on how much they want to share. Facebook has already started doing this.
Until this can occur, profile aggregation will be at the whim and mercy of the "terms of service" of the big walled gardens. As it stands, profile link list sites like My Mashable, ClaimID, Spock, and Rapleaf along with a mechanism to push your data to these services is just a hack. Unfortunately, its the only way to go for now.
really.. i'm not so sure that 'aggregating' social networking can become a killer app in 2008. Any player just want a bigger slice of market's pie so, they'll just try to get more subscribers from the other networks, thus nullifying any attempt to aggregate... I don't even know if common API beetween different network could be usefull, there are too many privacy issues and economical interests to let someone use private data soo hardly gotten from a subscriber
This article is really quite lacking if it doesn't mention Spock, which is like the most powerful robot controlled uber-social profile combiner and dataminer out there. http://www.spock.com/
W00T!
I can see how Social Network Aggregation apps would be useful for killers and stalkers, but isn't that a rather narrow market segment? (I hope.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
What's the big deal with social networking anyways? Do you let everyone know every time you take a crap? Social networking is for people who would otherwise stay at home and never hang out with anyone, but thanks to social networking they can be associated with hundreds of people who normally wouldn't give them the time of day. I got tired of managing all of the requests to join networks with former coworkers and people I barely knew so removed myself from all of these social networks and just delete all requests to join. It's just more spam taking up my time.
If you haven't got anything good to say, aggregate someone else's content.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
... but I can give you an answer in about a year's time.
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
It's bad enough to have a profile on one social networking site... if you have multiple profiles on multiple sites and need some kind of aggregating software... bah! 'Nuff said. We could beat this to death. Killer app? More like killer hype -- in the end, we'll be talking in December about how the promise of social networking aggregation was the greatest disappointment of 2008.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I was hoping the title of this story was something like "2008 is the year social networking sites died". Now we are hoping for something that lets us make them seem more legit? Please help us if this is what the Internet has come to.
"Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008?"
Maybe SL or Sony's "Home" could suucceed better?
...an app that aggregates the killing of social networks?
I'd much rather have one app that lets me kill large amounts of MySpace *shudders* than one app to manage all of my personal information on multiple sites (that I'm not actually registered on) that might have different versions of 'me' on them.
If it gets to the themeing level as well then can you imagine the havoc? Facebook pages with MySpace-esque unreadable backgrounds, or MySpace pages with (shock, horror) readable colour schemes!
As far as killer apps go, I think the aggregation site aggregators will be the go. Imagine, a site that aggregated slashdot, digg, reddit, engadget, oh wait, that's rss, never mind.
Fast forward to today, and we see different behavior. People "friend" you all the time, and your social network becomes populated with many people, some of whom you've never met. At some point it becomes useless as an affinity group, and you'd like to cull the list to make it more useful. The trouble is you don't want to dismiss someone by removing them from your "friends" list, even though your relationship is tenuous at best. The cure appears to be that people abandon profiles and systems wholesale, and jump to a new system with a fresh profile. Friendster begat MySapce, then Facebook, etc. Abandoning the system alienates no one in particular, and lets the user start over with a fresh list.
I'd bet that the last thing users will want is to permanently carry all that baggage with them.
I don't really use Facebook very much. For the things most people use Facebook for, I use Google for domains. However, I do use other sites like Listal, Last.fm, Flickr, etc. While these sites have social networking features, I use them for their database features primarily. Storing my photos, tracking my music listening, those are things I want to do.
Now, while I don't use Facebook itself, I do have an account. Thanks to Facebook's application API, Facebook is already sort of a social networking aggregator. Every one of the web applications I use has a Facebook application. If you add all of them to your Facebook, you get sort of an aggregated profile all in one place. Adding those applications I think is the smartest thing Facebook ever did.
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If they're "going the way of the MUD," does that mean they're going to go graphical, become a billion dollar industry, and start releasing TV advertisements from Mr.T and Verne Troyer?
MUDs are dead. Long live graphical MUDs (Everquest, WoW, etc).
(*Disclaimer: I still play text based MUDs.)
and maybe a bit more granular controls over your relationships in the social networks. its really silly that everyone that is on your friend list on myspace, facebook etc. are valued that same, when i do not have the same relationship with everyone i know in real life, some people are coworkers, some are friends, others acquaintances, some are coworkers and friends. if my boss finds my facebook profile and wants to friend me, well while i like him i don't consider him a friend, he is a coworker, and as such shouldn't be privy to all of the stuff i put up there for my friends.
we need finer controls over who can view what before we start to aggregate all of it together
I enjoy multiple emails, to separate things like /. notifiers from family email.
However, re: "NetSpeak", I simply ban it. I announce that if an email (message, etc) has more than two "Netisms" I add a nasty note to my answer. (This is different if someone is working off a mobile device.)
I never signed up for a MySpace acct because it doesn't actually do anything. My email is not crypted here, so if any of you felt I had to know something, you would have emailed me. I don't need a giant list of people who I've chatted with once.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I have a group of friends who were on Myspace, who have recently jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.
I gave Facebook a try, but it really irked me so I deleted it. So, a little over 6 weeks ago, one of my
friends asked me why I deleted my Facebook AND Livejournal account, and I said I was so over the whole
social networking "phenomenon". This friend became quite a bit ornery over that fact, so this leads me to
a theory. I think people like being on several different social networking sites. It's extra places to check
email, events, etc. The lashing out was like that of someone wondering why someone else couldn't get "their fix".
People are actually ADDICTED to these sites. The sites aren't even that great! (Most are extremely poorly written,
like Myspace)
What ever happened to email or mobile phone text?
- World of Warcraft
taking the MMO industry to the next level. Not really a revolution but evolutionary advance to better usability.Some write a spam filter for facebook please!!!!!!!!!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
2008 will be the year of the Social Network Aggregators, and 2009 will be the year for the Aggregators of all the Social Network Aggregators!
The chart in the article, of the fraction of people on two social networking sites, shows what's really happening. There's Myspace and Facebook, and then there's everybody else. Whether Myspace and Facebook decide to interoperate is a major business decision. For everybody else, what matters is interoperating with Myspace and Facebook. Few people care whether Orkut and Bebo interconnect.
Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. If successful, they become cool, they grow, the losers move in, they become uncool, and they decline. Has-been sites include Geocities, EZBoard, Nerve, Tribe, and, of course AOL. Facebook just caught up with Myspace last month, after a steep rise, but right now Facebook is headed downward.
Apparently they haven't heard of a little killer app called Duke Nukem Forever.
While it's true that most of what occurs on social networks today -- getting friend requests from strangers and spam, building ugly home pages that play 10 different songs / videos simultaneously when they load, the ability to tell a computer about your social relationships does offer potential.
An example: I recently talked to a friend of mine who is in a band, runs a recording studio, and works in one of the few remaining independent brick and mortar music stores in Iowa and he claimed if you make music, you have to have a MySpace page. For a band to be able to market themselves worldwide via a digital "word of mouth" network is a significant shift from the previous model of signing with a large record label. People complain about signal to noise, but that's only a problem because the signal is so amplified.
If people had the ability to do more useful things with their social networks than tell everyone about their favorite movies, or post stupid comments or pictures on other pages, there is potential to create other distributed systems around our social relationships. To do that, we need access to the data we've created about our relationships. We need to simplify management of the relationships.
Aggregation and Integration is a start. A "garbage collector" would be nice. Mobile access would be good. A way to group and rank our relationships is a must. And we need an easy way to control access to our data. Most importantly, people need incentive to put accurate data on their networks. Give them the ability to do useful things with the data and we may see less of the popularity contest we currently have.
I collect content from "social" sites and some people really dig it. :)
http://selectedmoviescenes.blogspot.com/
An example semantic web site which does attempt to combine your various social online identifies is http://qdos.com. Qdos gives each person a rank score, based on your online persona, i.e. the higher your social activity the higher your Qdos, you can also log in using OpenID, and you can get all of your data back in a triple notation. You can claim your name, and add your various sites to the profile, and raise your ranking, if you are that way inclined:
Perez Hilton (what a waste of space) in html:http://qdos.com/celeb/5030c86ab21d08595fcd9a93f4480d45/html
Perez Hilton in triples:
http://qdos.com/celeb/5030c86ab21d08595fcd9a93f4480d45/turtle
CmdrTaco in html:
http://qdos.com/celeb/4e24374b2e9d0209221f2a6a0fc6a100/html
CmdrTaco in turtle:
http://qdos.com/celeb/4e24374b2e9d0209221f2a6a0fc6a100/turtle
It's simple to see that in the past, there have been many attempts to unify technologies, sites, communication mechanisms online, don't succeed. Not because they're bad products, but because aggregation doesn't offer most users anything they actually want. From Jabber or Trillian to RSS feeds or anything else, they've always been a niche product and probably always will be.
I still read slashdot, news.bbc, the onion and so forth, plus sites like Facebook and Livejournal, on their individual pages, I don't use an "aggregator", such as RSS feeds and my own interface. Firstly, because it's fiddly to set up, and secondly, each of those sites usually offers something different in their interface which suits the content they're providing - often the most interesting stuff is outside of the "headlines", which is all you get on an RSS feed. You may be an avid user of aggregation, but as a Slashdot reader you're probably a lot more geeky than most people, and killer apps are those used by the Great Unwashed, not just us nerds.
This is particularly true for social networking sites, in my opinion. While there are many out there, and many people have profiles on each (from Friendster to Orkut to Livejournal to Myspace to Facebook), most people are "on" one at a time. The fads come and go, the popularity for each application comes and goes - something new comes along and people either migrate to it or they don't. Something will come along in 2008 that everyone will leave Facebook for - just as happened to Myspace in 2006/2007. Most users don't want the overhead of managing multiple online profiles, aggregation will make *access* to each one easier, but not the management of each one.
Because I have. I had this idea two years ago, and started reading Myspace, Livejournal, Facebook, Xanga, etc., TOS to see what actually is and isn't allowed on their networks. IANAL, but according to what I have read/seen, most have rules against automatically posting and receiving information without directly logging in through their particular sites. I remember one TOS actually stating that screen scraping and scripting of sites would not be permitted.
So,what's the business plan, then? Ignore the TOS, under the belief of better to ask for forgiveness than permission, or hope that their lawyers aren't as good as the ones you'll be needing?
As Seen On TV's? Come back!!!
It'll be the year of social network aggregators aggregators (i.e., meta level)! Guess what's going to be the Next Big Thing in 2010?
var sig = function() { sig(); }
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Anything that avoids the, email to tell you that you have an email that you can't access syndrome would be great. I have countless mechanisms for getting hold of email and messaging from all sorts of places and devices but oweing to more and more social networking I actually have *less* access as unless you use their web app you're screwed.
So before we get a hard on for aggregators, can we consider the point (more communication) beforehand so we this can go hand in hand.
http://www.livezuu.com/ is quite a nice social-aggregator app
Social data aggregation will not make money for long. A startup that provides a successful aggregation of social networks will set up a new standard for sharing this kind of information, thus opening the data. And at the very moment that social data is open and subject to a standard, there will be no profit made in just hosting this data: there will be competing, interoperable services that offer this service for free (as in beer).
Being first to this standard will provide some momentum and brand recognition for the best social provider, but ultimately it will have to find some other revenue source to stay in business (just like happened to search in the late 90s).
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
That's why I stick to only one site. Which isn't a problem in say Brazil or India. Is there really that deep a split between the American myspace and facebook that users can't stick to one? Aggregators are pointless if you do that.
They should call it Poopsmith. Shoveling all that useless shit into one place!
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
Isn't this the point of OpenSocial? If each of your social networks implement an open API, that makes aggregation easier.
Move along, no sig to see here.
To the naysayers out there, you should check out http://www.spokeo.com/ You will then know why social network aggregators will be huge in 2008. The concept is too powerful to ignore.
Pull in all your social networking site feeds into a clean chronological view and you have a Lifestream. There were a ton of sites that released services to do just this last year. It's a great way to share and see what your friends are up to.
Noserub - http://noserub.com/
;-)
It's great, and written in CakePHP
To compile all the idiots from different islands of social networking into one. Borg is bound to emerge from whatever's left when the world implodes.
Stay in school kids.