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By Alain Portmann
A single site that aggregates content from a variety of social network sites would be a blessing for consumers; who signed up for a variety of social-networking sites from MySpace and Facebook to LinkedIn and Flickr cannot keep track of them all. This development parallels the Instant Messaging space, which saw the launch of Trillian, a proprietary multi-protocol instant messaging application for Windows created by Cerulean Studios.
Google is funding a project dubbed “Socialstream” which could be the world’s first unified social network, aggregating all existing social networks into a single interface. The reality is that Google’s social network offering has not taken off. Google’s lone current social network offering, Orkut, is not ranked in the top ten by Hitwise for U.S. social-networking sites. But Google is not alone in the race to deploy the first aggregated social network. Blue Swarm a startup in private beta, and Wink have some features to aggregate social networks. Also, Mozilla is developing a social-networking browser that compiles different social networks.
The advent of an open source social network would undoubtedly impact the entire social media segment, forcing social networks to begin addressing churn and reactivation of dormant users. A unified social network would cash into the chronically unfaithful of social media. Nielsen figures confirm that network promiscuity is a factor, showing that 444,000 Britons visited all three of the leading rivals MySpace, Facebook and Bebo this year. The dangers of network promiscuity are illustrated by the fate of Friendster. The social network accrued more than 20 million users after its launch in 2003. In 2006 that figure had fallen to less than one million as users migrated to sites with better tools.
An aggregated social network would also allow for the application of collaborative filtering to social media. By aggregating from a larger set of information the method of predicting (filtering) the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users (collaborating) would be facilitated.
The trivialization of publishing brought on by social media is creating thousands of “publishing bubbles” which when aggregated can become incredibly powerful. John Blossom from Shore provides further perspective.
“Social media is challenging search engines as a starting point for finding answers to questions in part because people come to trust the insights and expertise of specific communities to provide both their own insights and insights from their own research. Answer-oriented communities such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers and LinkedIn Answers provide audiences the ability to vote on answers to specific questions – a competitive aspect to publishing that helps to both aggregate potential high-quality content and to rank its value.”
Alain Portmann, Web Liquid
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