A social aggregator; the social holy grail?
With the explosion of blogs and social networking sites over the last few years, its apparent (at least to me) that whoever creates a compelling aggregation service will be onto a winner. Facebook is getting there, you can already integrate it with Twitter, but what about all the other information sources we each use?
I consider aggregation from two perspectives; the publisher (me as an individual and my internet persona) and reader (me seeing everything my freinds & colleagues are up to).
Why do I need a publisher?
- I have several blogs each focused on a particular theme
- I have Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and numerous other online profiles
- I publish photos on my Flickr account, in my Facebook profile and in my Windows Live Photo Gallery
- I scroble music on Last.FM and I have a Zune profile
Few of these are connected, and many now offer competing services. Should I be uploading photos to my Facebook profile, my Flickr account or my Windows Live gallery? For me, the answer is all of them because each offer somthing unique. Flickr is great for “just sharing photos”, Facebook is great for sharing photos relating to some event and Windows Live is just plain easy with the local client (Windows Live Photo Gallery) and I tend to use it for my climbing photos. I want all these connected so anyone can see all my photos, nicely organised irrespective of the service they’re hosted on. The same applies for blogs, tweets etc; it makes it easy for you to see what I’m doing or thinking about. The converse of this is my desire to see everything my friends are up to, in one place. Aka, the reader aspect.
Whoever is able to pull together a social graph/aggregator like this, whilst still allowing the uniqueness of each service to be exposed (i.e. not attempting to replace each service, just provide a launch pad) will be onto a winner. They may even be one of the first to make money from social networking.
After writing this blog entry and searching for a suitable image, I found that Google are ahead of me and already have an API which could help a would-be developer build a social aggregator.