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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.
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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.
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.)
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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.
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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 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.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!
If aggregation was such a desirable feature, all our IM protocols would be intercompatible by now.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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?
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