Social Network- One Stop Shopping?

There are estimated to be between a gazillion and a bazillion different social networks - which, l'm sure, your son or daughter or you are members of. Sometimes, don't we actually wish, the most difficult of life's tasks is to keep up with the social networks that you've signed into. That very fact and the information that New York Magazine commented on about the upcoming new consumer in an extraordinary article a couple of months ago called, "Say Everything" that if you haven't read, shame on you and feel really guilty. That information? People are putting their lives online and revealing enough to embarrass even the most unabashed liberal I know - me.

So it made me wonder, after a conversation with someone who actually told me to think about it, what social network aggregators are out there?

Why bother? (you might ask...)

Cuz.

Actually, there is a reason. Think about what the technology of Web 2.0 has sparked when it comes to trusted sources, peer-to-peer conversation, business values and requirements and new models and the fact as The Cluetrain Manifesto points out so righteously "Markets are conversations."

Yet, what we don't always talk about in the Web 2.0 world is user interfaces that help us organize how we have those conversations. The benefit of a neighborhood of houses is that we have addresses that we can go to find the people we want to find. Imagine if we had the houses but they were just scattered everywhere. The benefit of the social network aggregation site is that it gives us a clean, singular way of finding and conversing with all the people we want to without having to go from house to house to house to house. It gives us a neighborhood that we can call our own.

The business benefit is only obvious for down the road. The best examples of companies that have understood the value of a single place for concierge-like service aggregation - which is, after all what a social network aggregator can provide - are companies like Rearden Commerce, which provides a personal concierge portal to any subsets of 135,000 business and personal services you might need in a single web "location," or Pivotal, who has been a CRM vendor who lives and dies by the portal - Employee, Customer, Partner, etc. portals. They're very good at portals, in fact. Always have been.

Think about what it takes to converse with customers a.k.a. other human beings online. Typically, each of us is an interesting person with diverse social interests and connections. Each of us has multiple networks and events that we intersect on a given day. That means, in order to maintain control over how we do whatever it is we want to do, we have to organize those interests in some way that makes rational sense to the individual "me." I don't know a single human being who doesn't love the idea of "organization of the chaos" in their lives. It's what the difference between a cluttered and an uncluttered life is.

In the world of Web 2.0, one of the best aggregation organizations is Meebo - a great example of a site that does that for something else - IM clients.

Okay, in that case, what about Trillian, an IM desktop client that aggregates other IM vendors?

Well, Trillian is pretty good but, what Meebo can do, that Trillian can't is things like 1. let you login from anywhere you can get to the Web. Trillian needs a client on premise somewhere. Provide you with other services like Meebo Rooms, where you can create your own community via the IM client on any topic of interest you care to. Trillian can't do that because it isn't a web-services based aggregator. At least not yet.

So, the social network aggregators...what's out there?

Not much really and they all lack a lot, when it comes to apparent business value or even general value but there is one that's a bit promising because of its sophisticated, very friendly, user interface or as we in the technology acronym business call it - UI.

Here's what I've found so far:

Spokeo a.k.a. Hypeit

This puppy is youngish cool looking and is very cutesy but not driven by much more that I can find that provides a lot that you can't get elsewhere. Here's a screenshot that pretty much says it all. It takes a digg-like approach while giving you multiple social network sites you can log in to. But when you register and begin to load it all up, it turns out to be pretty much an RSS Feed reader with a few sites associated with it that you can "hype" a la digg, - which is nice but not particularly interesting. Great for the sites you can hype though, if this catches on. It's kind of a combo adding a little of Trillian, a bunch of Digg and a lot of Feed Demon with a dash of "crowd wisdom" thrown in. You can hype the feed or your buddy - though the buddy is a feed.

Eh.

Profilefly

This one is far better than Hypeit and starts to be what a social network aggregator is - a profile-sharing site. Take a look at Elaine Hooton's listed networks. Plus her postings - which smack a bit of advertising. But the interesting thing here is that you can actually usefully aggregate your social networks and other key components of your online conversations - such as social tags etc. If something like this one takes off (I have no idea what its doing now) there - businesses will have a ready made complete customer profile - 360 degrees Holy Grail version - on demand - without even privacy issues (at least apparent ones) because each member has agreed to publicly share their information. Here's an excellent description of what Profilefly does in BusinessHacker.

ProfileLinker

This one is also a profile aggregator that uses Ajax in a great UI. Look at the dashboard and you can see its value lies in both the ease of use via Ajax and the workflow that the UI suggests - alerts via the web for common friends, new networks added, new interests, etc. The danger that TechCrunch points out is that these guys don't have the deals with the social networking sites the others do, so they depend on the profile to keep the connection. But the social networks could, technically and theoretically cut them off, though given the nature of a social network, you wonder why they would....

Profilactic

This one has a unique, also Ajax-driven approach which is to create a "mashup" around your profile. The idea is that you aggregate your "identity" online (including Twitter etc.), but that also includes content, not just profiles. This concept has a lot of promise but they label it as "Barely 1.0" and unfortunately, it seems that its barely 0.3. I couldn't get my mashup to work at all except when I included this blog and its not an issue of my technical proficiency. Plus a search of my mashup - in this case, only this blog, yielded zero results no matter what. To their defense, it may be that I'm doing something wrong. But this is a lot of promise and little execution so far. And "Barely 1.0" doesn't excuse that.

There's probably others like these, but I don't know them yet. I find the concept important because managing an online identity which includes data and content can be not just daunting but insane. The interesting thing is how the customer can start to dance with business using this incredibly rich source of customer detail. If the customer is willing to say, "hey, I'll let you have access to all this in return for something" - The customer's dance could be very seductive for business - as long as it isn't the Macarena.

This entry is just a curiosity thing really. I wanted to do the survey and see what I could find and play with and make some snap judgments on - though not that snap. But, I'm going to keep track of these kinds of sites. Aggregation is the new business model that we have to pay attention to and these are aggregation models built around something that has individual value. Is there a business value? Not that clear yet but I'd like to know a. what you think and b. if you know of other sites.

Keep me posted.

Oh yeah, tomorrow, I have what's for me at least a very, very exciting announcement - though it might wait until Tuesday.

Can't wait to tell you about it.

Technorati : CRM, CRM 2.0, Social Networks, Web 2.0

Comments

[Elaine Hooton]

Nice article. I just want to set the record straight. I knew people would think my links "smacked of advertising", but I really just love free stuff and wanted to give others the opportunity to get free stuff. I have no association with any of those sites.

I now use ClaimID. I prefer it to ProfileFly because it offers more options and uses OpenID logins.

[jamie nix]

i like profilefly.com

[Paul Sweeney]

www.peopleaggregator.com are one of the first entrants in this market. I agree that people will have to find ways to manage their presence across networks, but think that it will probably happen within a page in www.netvibes.com, www.pageflakes.com, or on your iGoogle. The key was "inter-widget" communications, and this is now in place on www.netvibes.com. Check out www.jaiku.com for an example of "lifestreaming".Could be an interesting inflection on "social streaming". IF I were a CRM vendor, I'd be trying to figure out what these things mean to my customers.

[Mimi Harris]

i don't think trillian works on macs. huge downer- which i why i am a meebo lover for my mac. even if trillian comes out with a mac version, i'll stick with meebo. with meebo, i discovered the stupidity of cluttering my desktop with im clients.

[sMoRTy71]

We checked out our error logs and it looks like the RSS feed link you tried to add in your mashup is dead:

http://the56group.typepad.com/rss.xml

That is the problem. Also, it doesn't appear that you tried to add any other sites to your mashup.

If you're still having problems, please let me know. Thanks.

[cybette]

I've also checked out the other aggregators (except for Hypeit) before deciding on Profilactic. Profilactic has pretty much what I was looking for: a central place to list my online sites and presences, a mashup of my online content, an RSS feed of the mashup (important to me), and even a "clippings" feature which I didn't previously think of, but now enjoy using very much (and often).

I've used Profilactic for almost 2 months and haven't had much problems except a couple minor bugs (which they fixed REALLY quickly). For the past week I have noticed some stability issues... growing pains obviously. But I think they have a lot of potential.

[sMoRTy71]

First, thanks for mentioning Profilactic. We appreciate any coverage we can get.

Second, if you could send me your username or post the URL to your mashup, I can take a look at the problem you are having.

We've been having some stability issues lately as traffic has been up quite a bit this month. It could have been that we were having a problem at the time. Or it could be that we have a bug somewhere.

Either way, I would love for you to be able to experience Profilactic the way we intended it.

Shoot me a mail at smorty71 at gmail dot com. Thanks again.