The Rise of the Social Media Aggregator

I think that it goes without saying that there is a tremendous impact that social media is playing right now on the Internet. Checking out the identity and entertainment lines on my favorite metro style web trends map shows how sites like Twitter, Facebook, Hi5, Bebo, Freindster, Plaxo, Orkut, and Friendfeed take up a considerable amount of the online traffic. Social media features are permeating almost every aspect of both corporate and consumer computing. Many users leverage multiple social networking sites such as 43% of Hi5 users also use MySpace and Facebook users tend to use 2.9 major social networking sites on average.

So, it should come as no surprise that there is now a plethora of applications presenting an aggregated view of multiple social networking sites. Apparently, it must make sense that the more sophisticated and active social networkers want a single UX that works across (and unifies) multiple, heterogeneous social networks.

I guess that the grand-father of this genus would be TweetDeck. They have versions for the Mac, PC, Linux, iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad and support for the Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, Google Buzz, and Foursquare networks.

Hootsuite is targeting the more dedicated media professional. They do support an aggregated UX for Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In. Their forte is a deeper integration and extension of Twitter with features for statistics, lists, workflow, and brand monitoring.

Digsby combines email, instant messaging, and social media aggregation. They support Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Linked In.



Even the open source folks are getting into the act. Gwibber is a micro-blogging client for an aggregated experience with Twitter, Identi.ca, StatusNet, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, FriendFeed, and Qaiku. I recently ran across Gwibber because it comes pre-installed on the latest LTS (Long Term Support) release of Ubuntu, still the most popular distro for Linux users.

Since social media users appear to want a unified experience in their micro-blogging, how long will it be before there is a recognized need for a unified social profile? I suspect that it will be something beyond what Disqus and Gravatar can provide. Will Google's OpenSocial initiative satisfy that need?

What other brewing trends can you spot amongst the social media set?

The Flat Enterprise Society

My company has a few collaboration products (Code-Roller and Cogenuity) so I often write about ECM because it is an exciting industry to be in these days.

Enterprise Collaboration is exciting in terms of growth but it is also exciting because its thought leaders have something interesting to say. Folks like Thomas Malone, Andrew McAfee, and Dion Hinchcliffe are doing a lot to advance modern corporate tribal thinking to greater levels of democratic culture.

Like any disruptive innovation, change is required in order to realize any benefits. Change has to come from both the board room and the water cooler in order for it to have any lasting effect. True change must come from above and below, from the executives and the rank-and-file. That turning point is what is usually called the watershed moment in the adoption curve of any paradigm shift.

That is why I got excited when I read this NY Times interview of the CEO of SunGard. Cristóbal Conde explains in day-to-day, boots-on-the-ground terms that any C level player can understand how the old ways of top down management simply won't scale in this modern age of global competition, cheaper communications, and the rising price of oil.

Conde does not come off as pompous. He talks about mistakes that he made before he understood the true value of collaboration. Other valid points that he makes include the fallacy of micro-management, the importance of intellectual curiosity, and the mental illness known as PowerPoint. Sounds provocative? Definitely give this one a read.

Linking is a Good Thing

Twenty years ago, Oxford University graduate Tim Berners-Lee wrote a memo to his boss while he was working at CERN. This memo was an information management proposal for a distributed hypertext system that we now know of as the World Wide Web. Note the major feature that he describes which was not video blogging nor banner ads nor even online chat. The major feature in this proposal was hypertext or "human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way."

This past February, the same visionary gave a presentation at the annual TED Conference where he was still advocating for more or less the same thing. This time, instead of web pages linking to each other, the data that feeds web pages should also be available online and link to each other. This is what is called Linked Data.



Linked Data is collectively intelligent. Individuals contribute relationship information when they link. This relationship information aggregates into fantastic models of our world. Models that help researchers, journalists, and ordinary folk span problem domains in order to solve new and ever increasingly complex challenges.

But there are barriers in the adoption of Linked Data whose measure of success and effectiveness will depend directly on its ubiquity. One big problem is that many organizations value their data and quite naturally wish to protect it. Propriety and intellectual capital are profound cultural barriers to linked data that I, for one, do not understand how to overcome. I think that it's going to be a little more of a challenge than simply to ask you to stop it.

Here is another, even bigger, cultural problem to Linked Data. In our current web society where page rank is the coin of the realm, nobody wants to provide links anymore. Linking is passé. When you link out to another site, you contribute to their page rank. If you compete with that site, then that diminishes your page rank. It's some weird mind-share zero sum game. It's the new variation on the tragedy of the commons all over again. You're so protective of your own page rank that you dare not provide outbound links. Thus, the original, fundamental, collectively intelligent value of the World Wide Web is tragically subverted by individual or organizational greed. This mindset has gotten so bad that many sites automatically flag your content as spam if it includes a link in it. I link a lot in my posts so I can tell you from first hand experience that many prejudiced people will dismiss you as a spammer if you provide a link, even if you are linking to something that you have no official relationship with.

Once again, this noble visionary has provided a map to a more intelligent world but we are going to have to revisit our current values in order to completely embrace the gifts that he has given us.

Living in the Facebook Downline

Just ran across this NY Times article on an emerging trend in social networks where Facebook and Twitter are openly and actively encouraging third parties to consume their services and re-purpose their content. The article then covers several startups who are feeding off of this social knowledge ecosystem.

With regards to this ecosystem, what I have seen in the wild are three patterns. A lot of UGC sites now permit you to post non-anonymously via some kind of federated login system. The second pattern is publishing content in multiple places such as micro-blogs on both facebook and twitter. The third pattern is profile synchronization across multiple social networking sites.

With federated login (sometimes called single sign on), you don't have to register at every site that requires registration. Instead, you can participate on a site as a registered user by logging in to an already existing account that you have. Under the covers the system, where you have an account, shares some knowledge about you with the system you are trying to use. Both Microsoft and Sun Microsystems tried their hand at federated login over a decade ago. Both failed miserably. Today's big players at single sign on are Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. Google and Yahoo use the OpenID technology to carry this off while Facebook uses its own Facebook Connect technology.

In the second pattern, you post some content and the system provides a way for you to immediately promote your content on the various popular social networking sites. Originally, this was called Viral Marketing where the system would volunteer to spam your friends if you would let it access the address book or contact lists from your main-stream email accounts. In this iteration, you are presented with options to send facebook notifications or tweets.

The need for the third pattern has risen only very recently as people start spending a lot of time updating their profiles on all of the social networking sites that they use. This trend is still fairly recent but two examples that come to mind are Disqus and Gravatar.

As to the startups referenced in the original NY Times article mentioned in paragraph one here, I would be a little nervous in investing in these companies. After all, they use the facebook and twitter back-ends as their main entre whereas these other companies see it more as the icing on the cake. I mean, what are they going to do if Facebook ever decides to shut down their free API?

The Whuffie Factor

I just ran across this great talk at last year's Web 2.0 conference by Tara Hunt on a knowledge management blog that I frequently visit.

She talks about how the leveraging of the feeling of reciprocity and social capital and the nurturing of a gift economy in the design of your product or web site's user experience is the most efficacious way to promote your message. She calls it The Whuffie Factor which is a term inspired from a book written by Cory Doctorow called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

She also contrasts this approach to traditional PR and shows how The Whuffie Factor is a logical extension to the prosumer approach of establishing authentic conversations.


The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities (Tara Hunt) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo.

IBM Virtual Worlds Conference

I just got back from a two day conference that IBM hosted on Second Life called Beyond Blogging which is a conference billed as by IBMers primarily for IBMers but also open to the public. I believe that this conference was organized by IBM's Seeking Business Value from Investment in Virtual Worlds on the 3D Internet group.

The first day of the conference was more about how cool Second Life is for consumers. My own interests in Second Life are more towards how the enterprise can use virtual worlds as an affordable way to telepresence for remote teams to web seminar with a back channel, all in an easy to use HUD. That is why the second day of the conference held more interest to me. They billed this as "virtual worlds behind the firewall."

The first speaker of the second day was Neas Bade (Sean Daque) who is a developer for OpenSim which is a 3D Application Server that can be used to create a virtual world which can be accessed through a variety of clients and on multiple protocols.

He talked about the Open Source Metaverse where you can create your own simulator and connect it to a public grid for free. He talked about some EAI for OpenSim such as LDAP and web integration. When asked about integrating virtual worlds with cloud computing, he referred to a small group of analysts called RedMonk.

The second speaker for the second day was Rufus TT Horsefly (Neil Cats) who talked about how IBM asked Linden Labs to bring up an instance of Second Life within the IBM firewall on their blade center hardware (they had 250 users per session) in order to host their AOT Conference. Some of the lessons learned here was the importance of identity for attendees including the use of realistic avatars and the need for helpers and for training including help with installation of the HUD and with getting voice chat to work. He also talked about integration with their Domino product and an offering of theirs called Sametime 3D.

From this conference, I definitely get the sense that IBM is anticipating increasing corporate interest in virtual worlds as a way of mitigating travel expenses for remote teams to work together and as a way to reach out to customers in a way that is more affordable than the traditional conference model.

June Update: Now it's official. IBM's New Meeting Platform is Based on Open Sim.

The Era of Collective Wisdom

These are changing times. When you see the same theme gaining predominance in many different areas, then pay attention because you are at a turning point in history.

I believe that we are entering into such a time. I call it the celebration of the collective.

This is most obvious in the political arena. Almost completely gone is the Republican mandated rhetoric of trickle down where big government is supposed to serve by abdicating it responsibilities as public servant. Even the most die hard GOP faithful advocate government bailout now. Years earlier, that would have been considered as either heresy or treason by those same people.

President Obama speaks often about how the major players are now the masses. Not only are the people who the government must serve but it is also up to the people to do the hard work of solving our current economic problems.

Crowd-sourcing (sometimes called collective intelligence, sometimes called community sourcing) is the online equivalent of this trend for celebrating the collective. In crowd-sourcing, the choices of the masses are cleverly aggregated to form recommendations to solving complex problems. This is a logical, evolutionary progression to the wikinomic movement where prosumers provide both the attention and the content.

Many companies have started to embrace the collective intelligence approach to solving their problems. Starbucks has launched their own site where you share your product or marketing suggestions for them. Dell has launched their own variation on this theme. Even old school media companies such as NBC and NPR are climbing on board this train.

If your company doesn't have the economic commitment to develop their own from scratch, then there is also a bundle of pure players in this field whose offerings you can leverage. You can either submit your challenges to be solved in their online site or license their software for a white label version of a site that is your own property. Innocentive is perhaps the original pure player in this space. Cogenuity takes the lessons learned from Innocentive and improves on it with a deeper integration of crowd-sourcing with social networking. There are also less corporate focused offerings such as the Why Not? Idea Exchange.

Sometimes it's not so obvious when you are participating in the wisdom of the collective. Every time you link to a another site from your site, you are contributing to Google's prediction market based collective intelligence product known as Pagerank. Netflix and Amazon do something similar with their recommendation engines.

We have entered the era of collective wisdom. Let us hope that the power of the people can prevail where the idolized individual heroes of the past have feared to tread.

Ambient Intimacy is the New Collective Intelligence

I ran across this puff piece in the Sunday, September 7 edition of the NY Times promoting Facebook and Twitter. It really helped me improve my understanding of the micro-blogging, social networking revolution.

Like many people born before the age of the personal computer, I was having a hard time understanding why the new prosumer generation have no problem uploading every single intimate detail of their lives into these social networking sites. Apparently, mankind had evolved past whatever needs that the first, third, forth, fifth, ninth, and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution were trying to protect.

Well, I was wrong again. It was while attending the Start Conference that I learned that Twitter's main audience was closer to my age than my children's.

The NY Times article called it ambient intimacy and featured quotes, both expert and anecdotal, linking this phenomena to another upwardly trending phenomena known as collective intelligence.

Having lots of low commitment, casual acquaintances is important for your social development. But there is an upper limit on just how many of these relationships you can have by shear virtue of the fact that there are only so many hours in a day and you have to spend time traveling to each of these contacts and arranging a common time for both parties to meet. That was before the web which reduced the personal costs of time and distance to near nothing. Now, with social networking web applications such as Facebook and Twitter, you can maintain a much larger number of casual acquaintances than before. I have seen the future of human evolution and it is virtual.

Prosumers do use facebook in lieu of personal contact, especially if there is conflict to avoid. Gone forever is the "Dear John" letter. You are much more likely to know that you have been ditched by your girl/boyfriend by seeing pictures of them dating their new paramour in their facebook photo album.

That NY Times article also brought up the notion that these web apps solved a basic human need that was not getting met in urban environments. "This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business."

The Next Crop of Web Startups

I recently attended Start - A Conference for Entrepreneurs held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

The conference was sold out and no wonder. Luminaries from Twitter and WordPress were there. Founders from 43 Folders, 500 Hats, and Wesabe had some great advice for young, budding entrepreneurs. You can read more about my take on the speakers here. It's the attendees that I want to point your attention to now. I met an Information Architect, a .NET consultant (rare amongst this tribe as Microsoft doesn't have a good hold on the web startup world), a marketing VP for the next killer in box app, an engineer for a social networking site devoted to reading books, and the CEO for a web site devoted to young children.

It's all about finding a niche and filling it. For a phenomena as highly democratic as the web, that means finding a market with an unfulfilled need and filling it. These people are passionate about what they want to do but it's a kind of passion that is all about sensitivity and listening to the market.

If what you are doing isn't working, then throw it away and start over. I don't mean give up. Be persistent but be persistent about what counts which is not the script you're currently working on. One of the attendees called it failing fast. Don't clutch on to your current attempt. If you do and if it's not right, then you'll burn out trying to make it work. Instead, keep looking for new ways until you find the one that works. Everything changes over time so, eventually, what works will stop working.

Flexibility, sensitivity, and agility are the keys to sustainable success. That was the message of this conference and that is my message when it comes to developing software which is my passion.

The Second (Life) Coming

Some recent announcements show movement on the part of Linden Labs to open up their protocols for Second Life such that others can host servers to participate in a federated, 3D version of the world wide web.

This is not Linden Labs first journey into open source when they released an open source version of their HUD. What's different this time is that they are taking steps toward releasing server code and protocols such that others can host virtual worlds on their networks which you could teleport to using the Second Life HUD. It still has a long way to go but it is a step in that direction.

Linden Labs isn't the only one using open source as a way to leverage themselves into a larger market where they have to share. This larger trend of moving from content provider to content platform provider means that Linden Labs has to give up a share of the revenue pie in order to be a founding participant in the vision of a World Wide Web where web pages are replaced with 3D virtual spaces and surfers who happen to be visiting that place at the same time get to text message each other.

Considering the impact of Web 2.0 and social networking on the web, I believe this to be a very natural and obvious evolution of the web. There are plenty of competitors who would love to beat Linden Labs to this punch so perhaps that is their "bottom line" motivation to move in this direction.

Facebook Joining the Open Source Bandwagon

It is expected that predominant social networking web site Facebook will soon announce the re-release of its platform as open source. Competitive pressure is credited as the reason behind this move as competing web sites are already positioning to get behind another open source platform for exchanging social information. This is driven by a larger trend in which content providers leverage Metcalfe's law by transforming themselves into content platform providers.

Media Economy 2.0

I just recently ran across this blog entry by Dennis Haarsager who has become CEO of NPR. He has been promoting the quest for the Long Tail in broadcast media for years. I have no access to the political internals of public broadcasting so let me simply hope that this move is indicative of a healthy change in the industry.

Broadcast media and retail music has always acted in fear of the Web 2.0 movement. They appear to see it as a threat, mostly in terms of intellectual property theft and loss of revenue. My hope is that they can begin to see it as a great opportunity for expansion in new markets. It looks to me like public broadcasting is about to lead the way.

May 15 update: The public sector isn't the only sector finally getting it. CBS announced today that they are purchasing CNet. Though not exactly considered the darling of the Web 2.0 world, CNet's extensive technology and gaming reviews and news shows that it does have an understanding of the long tail.

By Any Other Name

I ran across an opinion piece on CNet calling for the dropping of the term Web 2.0 in favor of something else. The "2.0" thing is really a clever way of saying "the next generation" or "a new way of doing something" and implies innovation. The piece is actually about how small companies re-invent and innovate in the first wave of a new thing while the big companies secretly sit back and learn from these efforts. Then, the big companies come in with deep pockets and take over.

Perhaps it is time to look for something a little more accurate than "web 2.0" but "user generated content" is a little too awkward for marketing buzz. In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I also succumbed to this cliché when I named the open source Web 2.0 News Portal project.

What would be a better name? Perhaps we should incorporate the term wiki in it since that term was used to describe one of the first online, collaborative web applications. However, that application really was a precursor to what we now know as "web 2.0" and doesn't really focus on any of the social media aspects of web 2.0

What do you think? What would be a better categorical term for web 2.0?