I haven’t been up on my Cringely, but reading one of my Tweeps, Oliver, led me to his recent commentary on social networks.
He makes a reference to the rise and collapse of CB Radio, and then spells out in his usual thoroughness, that the social networking emperor has no clothes (hm, not sure if that’s a good metaphor).
In my comment on the post, I mentioned that I too have been saying:
1) We don’t need another social networking service
2) He who brings the pieces together holds the attention – pointing to the opportunities for for social network aggregators (strong influence I was able to bring to Ovi.com)
3) Facebook has become an annoying Julie McCoy.
I keep seeing it this way:
- 2005 was the year of the blog (like TypePad)
- 2006 was the year of the content aggregator (personal home pages like Netvibes)
- 2007 was the year of the social network (like Facebook)
- 2008 will be the year of the lifestream (social network and social media) aggregators (I’ve been playing with them, like SocialThing and others)
What do you think?
i think that normal end users produce information (that can be aggregated) out of many fewer systems than you are presuming. therefore, the aggregators are a nice-to-have feature of the big social nets, not a category. this year will be about portable, multi-social net social apps and a few new hot social nets.
Scott,
I think your view of aggregators is slightly different from mine.
Yes, normal users are on a few systems. Yet, I think that is enough for aggregators. If a person has one photo site (say Flickr), one communication oriented site (say Facebook), and follow one video site (say YouTube), then having that all in one screen (like SocialThing and others are suggesting) is still of interest to the user.
In short, I don’t think you need to be on countless different networks to take advantage of a lifestream aggregator.
Scott,
I like the term ‘portable, multi-social net social apps’. Hmm, what have you got cooking?
Also, I take it that ‘portable’ you don’t mean ‘mobile devices’ but the the apps let you carry your socNet where you want to.
Hm, will these portable apps uncork the social graph genie?