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It's beginning to look like 2008 might be the year of the social aggregator as users begin to employ these emerging new tools to better manage and track their various online relationships, both personal and professional. The introduction of these new Web applications, such as Friendfeed, Socialthing!, Spokeo, Second Brain, and Iminta, are making it easy for users to keep track of what their friends are doing online while simultaneously demonstrating that there are compelling alternatives to being social online without having to, say, actively maintain a Facebook account. In fact, that's the very premise of this new type of social Web utility, which automatically tracks a user's public activity at sites around the Web including blogs, Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us and so on, and creates a single convenient feed for others to consume and track.
I've been evaluating a number of these applications over the last few weeks and so far Friendfeed seems to be one of the best offerings in this space and also supports one of the widest array of online services, with Socialthing a close second. Friendfeed currently monitors and aggregates one's social activity on 28 different services at the time of this writing, putting the result into one clean activity stream with a matching Atom feed. While the latency on some of the services Friendfeed tracks isn't always great -- del.icio.us bookmarks seem to take a good long while to show up for example -- the integration ranges from the workable to the robust, with surprisingly good support for Twitter's hashtags for example. Services you also might not have previously considered aggregating socially are also offered by Friendfeed including your Gmail status message, Netflix rental queue, and your LinkedIn activity.
However, a quick examination of Alexa traffic charts (partial sample below) shows there are no clear leaders in this emerging space that will soon be crowded with competition, if it isn't already. Peter Cashmore at Mashable tracked at least 20 entries in this space mid-last year and so it's interesting to see how quickly Friendfeed has risen among the various players. Ease of use, visual elegance, and breadth of service tracking appears to be the competitive discriminator here, like it is with so many things in the Web 2.0 world.
This morning Duncan Riley at TechCrunch covered the best ways to track Web 2.0 and he omitted social aggregators as something users should be taking advantage of, while explicitly including things like TechMeme and blog readers. That's because social aggregators are far from being mainstream yet and the long term staying power of these individual Web applications aren't clear either, making it a challenge to decide where to "move in". But increasingly -- as Robert Scoble did this week -- I'm finding that I'm checking my Friendfeed stream and not Facebook or Techmeme as much as I used to, and I suspect many others will as well as they find aggregated social activity streams the fullest and most convenient picture of their social network. The egalitarian nature of social aggregators is also appealing at a time when many social networks are trying to put up as much of a walled garden as users will accept.
The wild cards for this space include major players such as Google or Facebook credibly adding social aggregation to their own offerings as well as a killer app mobile entry. Open social networking standards such as Open Friend Format will also make this space interesting in the medium to long term. Please tell us your favorite social aggregator below.
These social aggregators vary in the tasks they handle well. Social|Brain,
for example, puts a premium on being able to organize the information in
the flow. If you think of the flow of information as just falling off the
table you do not need that. If you think of it as a record then organizing
becomes much more important.
The goal of Second|Brain is to solve the problem of content disparity and
create the world's biggest online content library. Lifestreaming is one of
our features for sharing one's online activities. But our main emphasis is
on organizing our users' content over time in personal content libraries
and add value to their content by offering content management, organization
and sharing features across all connected services.
"social aggregator"? sounds so un-sexy. ;) Dion, you make many good
points. I just started using friendfeed to keep track of all my stuff --
Read about it at:
http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/i-just-started-my-friendfeed/
Thank you for this interesting post! From my opinion, an aggregation of
social media feeds is the only way to stay "up to date" in your virtual
social life.
Hi, I am wondering why you do not mention jaiku.com, which is not only from
(I think) early 2006 but also bought by google (supposedly because of their
mobile angle but maybe also because they aggregate social feeds).
I think there will be a peak with the late majority picking up this
technology over the next few months, but I can see that there will be a
backlash with folks wanting privacy back. I'm seeing it at Myspace at the
moment. My company uses it to promote our offensive t-shirts and i'm
witnessing alot of folks deleting their profile, pruning friends or 'going
private'.
Social aggregators will be particularly important for the GenXers and Baby
Boomers trying to acclimate to the world of social media and "keep up" with
the overload of information. I just presented information yesterday on the
importance of higher education having a Facebook presence in order to
remain relevant to the students we serve and besides a resounding "why?"
from some reluctant social networkers, the primary obstacle is the
difficulty of managing the deluge of information and sites that students
find relevant (e.g., Facebook, Cyworld, Twitter, WoW, LinkedIn, Hi5, etc.).
As soon as my counterparts in the career world become more comfortable
with the idea of social networking in general, exploring social aggregators
and finding the most effective for campus career needs will be our next
step. Thank you for your information!
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Never been a fan of social sites. Used to be addicted to friendster but
then i realized, interacting in real life is much more fun. :D
Never been a fan of social networks. Used to be addicted to friendster but
then I realized that interacting in real life is much more fun. :D
Right now I am loving Digsby - It compiles all of the social networks I
check most often (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Gchat, IM, Facebook Chat)
into one chat window that gives me updates whenever something new happens.
I love not having to keep checking my minimized Gmail bar to see if someone
is talking to me, and if I get any personal emails I want to reply to right
away. However, I would love a brief description of each of the other
services mentioned in this post. I am open to explore any and all of them,
and am interested to see if other mediums (i.e. cell phones) can learn to
get along too. Or at least create some sort of umbrella program that would
be cross-carrier/phone number.
Love the picture of how friendfeed works, it looks like a really great idea
because social media is the next BIG thing.
