The web allows us to keep in touch with our friends in so many ways today. When I log into Facebook, I am immediately greeted with a news feed of activity.
Users can update their status too. So whether you like it or not, you know what they are doing.
Twitter is only status:
A can also see what people are sharing with Pownce:
I can always login to Flickr to see new photos uploaded by my contacts:
I can track what music my friends are listening to in real time with Last.fm:
I can even see which bookmarks that 30 or my nerdy friends are saving on del.icio.us:
The cool new product of 2008 is the friend feed aggregator. These are services that pull all of this social data into one feed for you convenience. Socialthing, Friend Feed, and Iminta are just a few of these products. I like em, but I prefer logging in to each individual service to keep up with the hustle and bustle that is my network.
Is Google working on an aggregator?
This is an advancement of web 2.0. We are moving towards the semantic web, where everything will gel into one interface. I am kinda excited about it.
This “data revolution” is fun, but also dangerous. On the other hand, only a select percentage of the population is participating in this social web. Imagine if everybody did.
5 Comments
Honestly, I don’t really see the use in these aggregator services like friendfeed and socialthing. They’re really just glorified feed readers. There’s an argument that only nerds understand feed readers… but there’s a simple counter: only nerds track friends across six or seven web sites & need an aggregator like this.
Haha, what? You don’t like knowing when Taylor writes on my wall? (your news feed)
I actually closed it so I could get more stuff in the screenshot
I can remember saying the same thing…
(I like this new way of catching up but I think something is lost when you don’t visit directly)
…about RSS feeds. Perhaps with a little more development and a few strong examples we’ll be aggregating like it’s the normal thing.
Some say that for every social network you join, you lose a small percentage of your network because people don’t move to the new network with you.
I think all this information will soon become too much to process.