Social aggregation
Comments: 1 - Date: June 9th, 2008 - Categories: In The News, Social Networking
Today’s WSJ has an article about keeping track of all of your friends’ activities on different social networking sites: Social Services: Lots of sites let you keep track of your friends. The problem now is keeping track of all the ways to keep track.
I was kind of surprised by the article: basically this space of social aggregators hasn’t changed much in the past 12 months. Spokeo is the most viable option and it has been running for at least a year. But have you heard of it before? The problem of keeping track of your friends’, family’s, and colleagues’ activities keeps getting more and more complicated with everyone now joining multiple sites. (”Did you post your status on Facebook or Twitter?” “I looked for that picture you mentioned…. is it on your blog or flickr?”)
Maybe the reason a single browser aggregator isn’t dominating this space is that people are pushing updates to other applications, either mobile or RSS readers. That’s at least my solution. Or just not keep track :).
Comment by Andrea - 17 June 2008 @ 3:49 pm
Yeah, I definitely have trouble keeping track of all the different places that people might post “updates.” And I also find it hard to decide where to update what. For about a day, I let twitter update my Facebook status message, until I realized that I didn’t want my facebook status to be an ongoing conversation with the Muddy crowd. It wouldn’t make any sense. I think it’s mostly because I’m over 30 :) but there is a lot of meta-management and thinking about audience for different updates in different places. Now I feel like I really understand danah boyd’s master’s thesis about online identity management.
Leave a comment