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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 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.