A few months ago my biggest concern was over whether or not it was a good idea for someone to create a social network aggregator. I spent some time looking at social network aggregators and even more time considering the implications for user privacy involved with them. I also considered the subject of OpenID, a possible alternative. But since then it seems like the need for a social network aggregator has been resolved by efforts of competing companies to replicate each other’s services and also each other’s hubs. In other words, if you have a list of contacts in one place you can a) interact with them elsewhere without re-creating the wheel or b) import them wherever you go or c) interact with them up to a certain point without re-creating the wheel.
The problem with all of these is generally the same - if one company allows you to pack up your contacts and all of the data associated with them and all of the data involved with your activity inside of their universe then you can leave them behind and not look back. Companies have a vested interest in preventing this. In a company’s early stages it may be advantageous to allow data to play well elsewhere, but over time this becomes a problem. And with this problem social networks become much more like traditional service providers - think big telco’s that have learned to make it extremely difficult for you to leave them for another carrier.
In the mean time, we all have to deal with the service and feed pluralism while the major players battle it out for our already short attention span. Take Plaxo - they have re-introduced the “USERNAME is …” status indicator to us. I guess they didn’t get the memo about the “is”. Plaxo is suggesting people who I might know just like Facebook now too. And then there are Linkedin and MySpace - both of them are working hard to replicate features and the UI of Facebook.
We all have to make personal choices about how we interact with the social graph, but with all of these different companies offering similar services it is getting increasingly difficult to do so. In this increasingly competitive market the winners will be the established players, not the newcomers. Google and Facebook will continue to dominate, but Yahoo might be in a position to re-gain some ground if they can work on improving their ui and product/content integration.
