Can Aggregators Survive As Social Networks?
How dare you speak ill of Buzz!
I always find it interesting which posts I write get people worked up. It’s rarely the ones I think it will be. My last post about Google Buzz got me some negative feedback. That’s fine BTW I appreciate all feedback as long as its constructive.
I didn’t realize it until today but ReadWriteWeb and Mashable also covered the PostRank report I referenced.
What I learned is that Google Buzz loyalists are a little sensitive. I don’t blame them really. Most of them feel defensive after they invested so much time into (and many continue to) building out FriendFeed, only to have it acquired by Facebook. Despite reassurance that FriendFeed will (supposedly) continue to live on, many are skeptical.
Besides being called a Buzz hater in the comments of my last post, I was also challenged in the comments of the syndicated version of that post on Social Media Today and got at least one blog response.
My friend, Louis Gray (who didn’t reference me so unfortunately I can’t take it personally) felt all these posts and their regurgitated tweets were shallow.
And they were. What PostRank failed to mention and I assumed was in their data was that PostRank can’t measure the comments to the content being aggregated into Buzz. Illya only brought that up in the comments of the post. I never claimed to be a journalist or to check secondary sources but that was still a #FAIL on my part.
The Real Question
My question about Buzz, FreindFeed and these aggregator sites is if they can survive as both an aggregation service and a social network?
The simple answer is yes. Is Digg a social network? Yes. Is it an aggregation site? Most definitely. But their content is very specifically news and blog posts. Twitter and Facebook are often used as aggregation sites but I would argue that it’s not their primary use.
For the most part the content “aggregated” by Twitter, Facebook and Digg are actually curated. People manually choose to post something. Yes you can pull in feeds but most don’t. Although Digg will soon be making it easier to aggregate content directly and Facebook is making it even easier to curate with their soon to be ubiquitous like button.
The biggest problem I see for FriendFeed and Buzz is that their primary service is aggregation while conversations and original content is secondary. This is the exact opposite of most social networks that also allow aggregation.
Today, most people don’t want to wade through a fire hose of content to have a conversation. Both services allow you to extensively tune the level of non-original content. But most people will never go through that effort.To me this is the thing that will keep aggregators as social networks from ever taking off.
There is nothing wrong with a niche social network that is primarily an aggregator. The question is will Google and Facebook (as the owner of FriendFeed) continue to support a niche social networking site?
Continue reading here: The Death of the Single Function Device?
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