Escape from social network frenzy?

With all the talk about social network aggregators over the past few weeks, you'd think they were going to reverse global warming.

Technology blogs have been chirping enthusiastically about "lifestreaming" services like FriendFeed and Socialthing, which claim to provide an answer to growing complaints about "social-networking fatigue." They sort updates across networking and community sites into a single destination--which, in a sense, actually might be the social-media world's equivalent of reversing global warming.

Unfortunately, they still don't get rid of the hot air.

Let me get this straight: The last time I checked, I had accounts on Facebook, MySpace.com, Twitter, Flickr, Plaxo, Digg, Tumblr, Pownce, and probably a bunch of others I'm forgetting--that's not even counting whatever I do with my Google and Yahoo accounts. Now I'm supposed to choose between Pulse, FriendFeed, Digsby, Socialthing, Spokeo, Profilactic, and goodness knows what other start-ups that offer me the ability to aggregate my contacts' activity from all the aforementioned social networks, and more. Oh, great.

Don't get me wrong. I think we need some way to tidy up the messy social Web. What OpenID is trying to do for log-in and password management, lifestreaming services are hoping to accomplish for the voyeuristic itch to know exactly what all our online contacts are doing. That's a good thing.

"The big sell for these sorts of products is the tipping point at which users will see these as a viable alternative to manage their many profiles," social media strategist Oz Sultan told me in an interview. He compared it to the rise of universal instant-messaging clients like Adium and Trillian several years ago, which took off amid the disconnect between chat software from AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and more. "It becomes either overkill or a system resource hog," Sultan said.

But taking overkill and putting it all in one place doesn't mean that it's not overkill anymore. Consider it social-networking's first identity crisis.

To anyone with more than three or four social-networking profiles, lifestreaming services should be a godsend. That is, until you consider the flip side: too much information, and for the most part, not much flexibility on the picking-and-choosing front. A single, giant feed of dozens of Flickr photo albums ("Grand Canyon Vacation Album #3!") alongside Facebook status updates ("Brad is at the office") and Twitter minutiae ("I really need a shower!!!") turns us on to the realization that even our friends broadcast a whole lot of dumb stuff that we don't really care to read about.

"Right now, we just simply feed all this stuff in, and it can be a bit overwhelming," said Matt Galligan, founder of Socialthing. One of the company's goals, he explained, is to be able to showcase "interesting" updates without requiring the user to do a whole lot of manual prioritizing. "Getting the most important stuff to you is what I really want to do," he said.

To an extent, the lifestreaming services have an excuse. "A lot of (lifestreaming) is early to market," Sultan said. This is, after all, the fast-paced world of Web applications, where it's common to announce or roll out a product eons before it's truly ready (hello, OpenSocial). With small start-ups, it's less likely that someone else will replicate the idea first, although the fact that there's already a glut of lifestreaming services does sort of render that point moot.

So it's understandable that something as new as a social aggregator has a long way to go, Sultan continued. "They still need to enhance functionality to allow you to dial it down or filter only what's relevant," he said. "When either AI (artificial intelligence) technology, 'smart' filters, or other user-based filters are implemented, the model has a high chance of taking off."

Then there's the fact that, despite the information overload that a social feed aggregator provides, it's still feature-light. Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed, perhaps the most "social" of the bunch, let users comment on items and add favorites; many of the others, like Socialthing, are meant to be more along the lines of a personal reference. In either case, none of them replace the need to still log in and visit all the Flickrs and Twitters and Diggs from which they collect data.

"Social-media aggregators provide a high-level view of activity taking place on social networks, but do not replace the experience of being immersed within them," commented Eric Litman, chairman of social-media agency Aux Interactive. "So much of the tone of the dialogue in social networks is set by the user experience of the networks themselves."

That's really the final word on lifestreaming services: they help out, but simply don't do enough to clean up the social-media experience. Beyond simple aggregation, it's a whole new can of worms--I can handle multiple e-mail and IM accounts through Digsby, update Twitter and Pownce and Jaiku through Twhirl, and take care of all my photo- and video-uploading needs through the Flock browser. That's enough to make any geek want an aggregator for the aggregators.

Whoever manages to mesh all this into a single "social dashboard" just might be the next hero of the Web.

[svk1069]

Social Dashboard?

Isn't that what the new NetVibes "Ginger" release aims to provide?

My choice, though not the most popular, is Plaxo's Pulse.

[aerosky1229]

It is up to users, not computers...

If the social meshup application is truly the solution to everything, it could already have done. While we do not own the very intelligent artificial intelligence algorithm to perfectly filter out only wanted information, we can come up with the social meshup application or whatever.

The problem is actually with people. In your computer, for instance, how many programs and games have we installed that never get used? I know many gamers who have installed old classics like starcraft and half-life, but they never get played because they are busy playing new generation games. Do we really need 1 trillion bytes of hard drives while already seen videos and "never-to-listen-again" music sit around your hard disks somewhere? Users download and install gigabytes of softwares and videos on their computers and blame their computers for being slow. But of course, the computer will slower because the processor has a hard time partitioning the drive if the memory gets larger. What about the internet? Do we really need billions of domain names where most of them do not even have any useful content? This practice of creating a domain name to sell later is called "domain parking," but the creators are just greedy about selling the domain names on Ebay.

I also had the accounts in MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Xanga, Cyworld, and some other "now-don't-remember" blog sites. I found the Facebook most useful, though I do not really use that either anymore, and I end up deactivating other accounts. If you want useful informations to get to you, you can do so by using RSS technology and just use some conditional statements to filter out only useful information. That is, if you really bothered by the flow of information, and that is a personal problem not everyone has.

[bbmorph]

Who Cares What We're Up To?

The concept of lifestreaming bores me to tears. I don't want to know that my friend has just bought an ice cream and I don't want tell my friends that I have. The occassional, major announcement is of course very useful, however, and maybe there's a need to filter content (algorithmically, perhaps) for the more important messages.

Now, in agreement with Oz Sultan, if Lifestreaming is a way into cornering the market for everyone having one, portable profile (we've a recent blog post on this - http://www.rmmlondon.com/archive/social-media-futures-persistant-profiles/) then there's great value for the winning provider, because that indeed would be hugely beneficial for us all. But OpenSocial and the OpenSocial Foundation seem to be ahead of everyone at the moment.

[Sknygrydg07]

Agenda for Importance

Important and 'major events' are dependent on the person they affect. Getting ice cream may be a big deal to a recovering anorexic. The quantity and quality of communication in a relationship is determined by the participants and should not be subjugated to outside determinants of importance. If you're bored - turn off the computer and go outside.

[savvyzkg]

Streamlining preferred

Thank you for this post. What a relief to know that someone who is highly involved in Social Networking can feel overwhelmed. I was beginning to feel like a Social Networking WIMP as I'm trying to navigate and contribute to all these sites. With so many people talking about how great Social Networking is, it's nice to hear that some might actually appreciate a way to streamline the process.

[WeCanDoBIZ]

Aggregators need to offer SSO

Aggregators as they exist are barely doing anything useful. To have the minutiae of my contacts lives all neatly packaged to one place isn't of interest - if anything, the constant stream of detritus is what will turn me off social networking. Much more interesting is the rest of the content of such sites, the contacts I could be making, the groups being established, none of which find their way to the aggregators.

I think this space will disappear before too soon to be replaced with something closer to a social networking/media launchpad, with single sign on straight into where the value is. There is no doubt in my mind the most useful social networks will be the most specialist ones, appealing to an interest group or specific need. It will be impossible for the current crop of aggregators to keep track, so I think a few "portals" will come along (Google, Microsoft, Clickpass perhaps) that offer aggregation of destinations, not content, with single sign on into each.

And the sooner people stop obsessing with micro-blogging the better!

Ian Hendry
www.wecando.biz