FriendFeed, Jaiku and Plaxo Pulse: Networks within networks

Brian Dillard, Friday, October 19, 2007 @ 2:00 pm

I'm as sick of signing up for new social networks as anybody. I'll never get back the hour I spent establishing an Orkut profile I never used just because two hipster friends momentarily thought Orkut was cool and badgered me into submission.

That said, I'm a little dismayed by the identity-management land rush. For a couple of years now, we've been hearing about this glorious world in which we'll be able to aggregate our online identities across multiple social networks. In just the last few weeks, I've gotten invitations to beta-test three new identity aggregators (FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and Jaiku). And now Facebook announces that it wants to make my data portable so I can take it with me to whatever network I want - a move unsurprisingly endorsed by Plaxo and other bit players.

Facebook's announcement is obviously a marketing move - just another step in its strategy to position itself open ecosystem rather than a closed network. But FriendFeed and its ilk are another matter. I have no doubt that the future will involve a procession of new, flavor-of-the-month social networks. But it's hard to imagine any one of these meta-networks building the ubiquity of the networks they cannibalize.

Most of these services fall into three categories: content aggregators, identity managers and reputation protectors. Content aggregators (such as FriendFeed and Profilactic) try to mege all of your "attention data" into a single stream for syndication. Identity managers (such as FindMeOn) seek to create a "master" online identity with permissioned access to all of your other identities. Reputation protectors (such as Naymz and ClaimID) help you establish and protect your online "brand."

There's a lot of overlap between the three concepts, but they all suffer from the same problems:

• They're too complicated to use: I gave FindMeOn a whirl about a year ago, but I found its system of "badges" and "digital keys" complex and annoying. It didn't help that its visual design and Ajax interface were so cluttered and quirky. FriendFeed, which is still invite-only, offers a much cleaner and more direct user experience. But its RSS mash-up strategy is far less ambitions than that of FindMeOn and its nebulous parent, Syndiclick. Regardless, none of these services really reduces the complexity of managing your online identities. If anything, they add to it, forcing you to keep one more profile up to date.
• They solve a problem most average users don't have: Tech professionals and early adopters may all have a zillion online identities, but most social-network users have at most a handful of accounts. As they discover new services, they're likely to stop using older ones. I loved Friendster as much as anybody back in 2003, but I never log on anymore because none of my friends do. Ditto MySpace circa 2005. I may have a trail of social-network accounts, but only a few are ever going to be truly active at any given time.
• They're a little too good at what they do: As earlier commentators have pointed out (here, here and here), social networks often derive much of their value from being walled off from one another. Users may want to share different data with friends, family members, colleagues and romantic prospects. Aggregating all of your identities just to re-segment them seems like too much work.

Is anybody out there actively using these services and, if so, how useful are they? As always, I'd love to hear in the comments.

Technorati Tags

• social networking
• Friendster
• MySpace
• Facebook

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Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   I would like to draw your attention to another alternative which is a paradigm shift for AJAX front ends. One should be aware that I am not, and do not pretend to be objective, never the less I believe that one can judge for himself. Visual WebGui is an open source rapid application development framework for graphic user interfaces of IT web applications. VWG replaces the obsolete paradigms of ASP.NET in both design-time and run-time which were designed for developing sites, with WinForms methodologies, which were designed for developing applications. Thus enabling designer that was designed for application interfaces (WinForms designer) instead of a word documents (ASP.NET designer). This provides the developer with an extremely efficient way to design interfaces using drag and drop instead of hand coding HTML. Visual WebGui is an AJAX frame work that doesn’t expose logic, data or open services on client requests and therefore is not as vulnerable as common AJAX solution.. VWG presentation layer is de-coupled and instead of standard browser it can, and will run Silverlight.
   NO!!! Visual Webgui is not!!
   Not a component library – It is a complete revised approach to developing web applications.

   not a JavaScript generator – It runs on the server controlling the browser using a small static JavaScript kernel.

   Not for developing sites – It was designed to provide for developing IT web applications GUIs.

   Not a closed / locked-in framework – It has many extensibility features, which allow integration of legacy resources (ASP.NET or DHTML resources) and the development of custom controls and behaviors.
   Worth a look at http://www.visualwebgui.com,

   Comment by navot, Sunday, October 21, 2007 @ 5:24 am

2. 

   I use both Myspace and Facebook (plus I have a blog on Xanga.) Back when I was in college (you know, “back” in 2005), Facebook was only available for college students. So as hesitant as I was to have two (or three) internet identities, I created a Myspace page to keep in touch with my friends who did not attend college. I had never heard of these “identity managers” until I read this blog, but without even trying them I already endorse your conclusion. It sounds too complicated. First of all, I think most people enjoy spending hours carefully crafting their internet (and probably consequently their actual) identities. But more importantly, as you said, most of us have different profiles for different reasons or social networks and prefer to share certain information with certain groups (let’s not forget the time a good friend of mine accidentally came out to his father via Myspace.) I guess if you were running for office or something and maintaining dozens of online profiles these identity managers would be something worth exploring, but I think I speak for most recreational social network-ers when I say that it sounds like more trouble than it is worth.

   Comment by Amy, Wednesday, October 24, 2007 @ 12:52 pm

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