The first was FriendFeed which provides a feed of all of your activities across the social web. You designate services that you belong to (e.g. twitter, blogger, YouTube, etc) and FriendFeed aggregates all of your activities across those services into one feed to be viewed by those following you. Similarly, FriendFeed makes it easy to find friends to follow or others that you may want to follow based on who your friends are following.
The second was Swurl which is very similar to FriendFeed but also has a calendar view to see feeds in a calendar format with the ability to drill down by day to get further details on any given day.
The third was Spokeo which is more of a spying service than a social media aggregator. It does not require you to follow anyone and pulls in available information about any contact based on unique email addresses from most available sources. At a glance, you will see your friends updates from LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, Filckr, etc. without anyone even knowing that this information is being shared or viewed. I was amazed by the wealth of information I was able to find about people I know. There are also premium services to access further information that will be useful for HR managers to do background checks before making a hire. Spokeo is screaming with privacy concerns.
I draw two conclusions from these three services.
- The first is that our digital selves are becoming a commodity. There is so much information about each of us available across the Internet and social media sites that the power now rests in the ability to aggregate and present everything about us in a manner that engages the audience. With so many moving parts, it is hard to predict a dominant winner with each new service aggregating more information and adding further capability.
- The second is that while aggregating information about ourselves is useful to communicate a comprehensive view of our digital selves, it still does not solve the manual uploading challenge. A big problem still exists in the upload process to get our media into the social media ecosystem in the first place.
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4 comments:
I'm agreed with you that digital selves are increasingly commodified, but last week you wrote that there's little money to be made from digital social selves. I'm trying to figure out how both of those can be true... Is it just that our digital selves are commodities only in the aggregate - the data of our online lives can be sold - but not as individual targets?
Course if that's true, then all of our online activity is generating free money for other people, and maybe we should get paid for our "work," but that's just snarky.
that was me, by the way.
RY
spokeo scares the crap out of me! it's a good site to spark the conversation of digital privacy.
C'mon, stay up to speed...
http://www.gnipcentral.com/
We're pinging FB about standardizing API sec protocols, btw. This would mean that the same type of control you manage with external sites/mobile apps/internal apps would be unified for you as the user between MySpace and FB.
Give the user control of their data.
~Paul
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