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.

Social aggregators

[BWJones]

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 [utah.edu] 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 [lijit.com]. 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...

What's the big deal anyways?

[GottliebPins]

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.

Re: going the way of the MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [worldofwarcraft.com]?

MUDs are dead. Long live graphical MUDs (Everquest, WoW, etc).

(*Disclaimer: I still play text based MUDs.)

Re:I'm not so shure

[Hatta]

If aggregation was such a desirable feature, all our IM protocols would be intercompatible by now.

Aggregation will never be big, to most people.

[Fross]

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.

Anyone actually read Social Networks TOS?

[untouchable]

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?