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Tech & VC 12 Feb 2007 04:41 pm

Social Network Aggregation

There has been a lot of conflicting views on the notion of aggregation and consolidation of social networking features. The geeks want it, and the less-tech-saavy seem indifferent.

Here’s a few examples to explain the “nerdvana” of social networking: why do I need 43 different profile on different sites that all say the same thing about me? Why can I write my profile in one place from which all other social networks can read? How come everytime I want to check my social network site messages, I need to login to each site individually? There needs to be common login credentials that all sites share. And, why do I have to rebuild by friend network on a new social network? If I’m friends with Sue and Bob on Friendster, and Sue and Bob are also on Myspace, it should be easier (one-click) to re-establish these friendships with Sue and Bob on Myspace.

Jon Udell thinks its time to solve these problems as they hurt the potential for a site to reach critical mass. Tim O’Reilly echoes similar sentiments.

danah boyd thinks that this notion of portability and consolidation is strictly an the desire of adults, and she has field research with teens to support her claims:

While adult bloggers talk about building an identity through extended blogging, i keep finding teens who got locked out of Xanga and responded by making another Xanga (or a Blogger or a LiveJournal). They have expressions scattered across numerous services with numerous handles. Some teens chew through IM handles like candy; their nicks are things like “o-so-funny” rather than the first name, last name standard that seems to pervade professional worlds. It’s not seen as something to build an extensive identity around, but something to use to talk to friends in the moment.

Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They’re going to a new site, they want to start over.

Dave McClure falls closer to danah’s camp; he says that most people (not geeks) are more concerned about forgetting their passwords than about sign-in consolidation.

Of course, I love the idea of interoperability and portability, but I think danah makes the strongest arguement out all the voices I’ve heard on this subject. She knows what the mainstream audiences actually want because she watches their behavior and asks questions to tease out their motivations.

Can you imagine your average high school Freshman using OpenID in its current state? It’s a usability nightmare. Your user name is a URL… that concept alone cripple the experience, not to mention the permissioning system involved in joining new services.

That being said, no user could have possibly asked for VisiCalc before it was invented… and if the designers of VisiCalc made choices to reinforce existing usage of paper spreadsheets instead of optimizing and improving behavior, VisiCalc would never have been invented. Just because OpenID is difficult to use, doesn’t mean that the “VisiCalc of consolidation” isn’t out there just waiting to solve all our frustrations with social networking fatigue.

I don’t know if social network aggregation and consolidation is a real trend for the future of web services outside of the TechCrunch crowd or not. My opinion relative to all these authors is somewhere in the muddy gray middle. But, I’m fascinated by the current discussion.

Comments (7)

7 Responses to “Social Network Aggregation”

  1. on 12 Feb 2007 at 5:52 pm 1.Alex Iskold said …

    I think the right answer falls off if I put on my engineering hat :)

    There is a basic set of information about me that make sense to replicate – my name, age, address, etc. Also, my books, music, etc. picks (although, possibly not quite, see below).

    But… each of these social networks focuses on a different dimension of a person. MySpace is sort of all encompassing thingy for the wild. LinkedIn is different, Flixster and Last.fm are specialized, then Facebook is sort of clean MySpace possible in the future like LinkedIn, but for now much more a hanging out place. All of them are about putting a different skin or in programming terms, view on my data.

    So the talk of the consolidation is great, but what exactly, besides the login and possibly some basic information about a person that we are looking to consolidate?

    Alex

  2. on 12 Feb 2007 at 8:35 pm 2.Lee said …

    It would be great if people’s “social data” or “people data” could be connected up in the ways that make sense for how they use them, but also divided up based on what makes sense for that person, especially based on context (friends, work, family, music) For me, my LinkedIn helps keep track of people I meet through networking, but I can’t connect it to my address book, Blackberry, IM, or notes I keep about who I contacted, who I have to follow up with etc. (37signals announced an app called Highrise that is supposed to help with this). It’s especially frustrating to use services that are closed communities, so if someone’s not actually a member of LinkedIn, tough, you can’t add them to my page, making it less useful for keeping track of a network. My blogging “social data” is scattered across MyBlogLog, all the individual blogs I read and comment on, and the specialized recommender services like last.fm. Also, right now the social networks seem to focus most on letting me create a page that links to all my friends, rather than on the actual communication which happens via blog, IM, email, phone, etc. Maybe there could be some kind of app that can coordinate all of this in one place, or connect to all the services and have them talk to each other.

  3. on 13 Feb 2007 at 7:08 am 3.Fred said …

    There’s obviously a middle ground in this debate – between the teens who supposedly want to throw away their password and the Techcrunch crowd that desires real interoperability. It is important that OpenID start simple, and start by addressing the actual needs of a userbase. For a start – OpenID blog commenting. OpenID allows verified, SSO-based commenting all around the web, and soon it will be integrated core into many free blog platforms. That’s not too difficult or awkward for early-adopters to get, and it doesn’t require the wholesale consolidation of identity or anything else like that. It just solves a single problem.

    If we can divorce the technology from the expectations (which are unfortunately colored by technologies like Passport) OpenID makes sense. It needn’t take over the world from day one, and it won’t. These changes come gradually. If three years ago I had told you that every teenager in america would care about rich metadata, would you believe me? Well, they do – and the rich metadata they put so much work into is song information in iTunes. And a whole host of other things now. OpenID alone isn’t the solution – but when integrated properly into a context, it will be a solution, one that makes sense to many people.

  4. on 13 Feb 2007 at 9:01 am 4.Andrew Parker said …

    All these points about the context are great. I think context, style and attitude of a network are paramount, and portability is a dream that ignores these context-specific characteristics. This position is closer to danah boyd’s perspective in the range of opinions in this debate.

  5. on 13 Feb 2007 at 9:08 am 5.Andrew Parker said …

    Lee,

    Seems like Gaim, Trillian, or other IM client consolidation solutions are in the best position to do something like what you describe towards the end of your comment… but I think closed standards will keep this from happening for a long time. I want Exchange email because of the high-quality blackberry sync tech, but that means I’m locked into Outlook. Similarly, Skype’s consistent efforts to obfuscate their protocol force me to use two IM clients (Skype and Gaim). An all-encompassing messaging solution feels a long way off in this environment.

  6. on 13 Feb 2007 at 9:49 am 6.dave mcclure said …

    i’m not against better tools / portability for social networks, nor against OpenID per se, however i just think these are 2nd order issues for most people that come after the more basic fundamental issues (like forgotten passwords).

    i certainly agree such tools could be useful, however in order to get mass adoption they need to be a hell of lot simpler / more usable / automatic than most stuff i’ve seen so far. also they’re fighting an uphill battle against the major platform providers [mostly] siloed offerings.

    anyway, i don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade… if they develop something that works, i’m all in.

    - dave

  7. on 13 Feb 2007 at 2:15 pm 7.Andrew Parker said …

    Dave,

    Have you seen Mugshot.org’s login process. By default, they do a email confirmation form of login. You can login with a password if you hit “alt-p” or click a small link, but, by default, you have to use a confirmation email every time. It’s an interesting solution to the “forgot my password” problem. It’s a bit cumbersome for me, but at least they’re thinking outside the box.