I have never met a writer who says more in less words than Richard.  No wonder we hired him!

This article sums up perfectly where we’re coming from with PeopleAggregator.  We’ve been engaging in an internal debate since Gnomedex - on our messaging and positioning.  I am so close to the product that I didn’t realize folks would be confused.

Some think that PeopleAggregator is an end-user facing, competitor/alternative to MySpace or Faceback.

PLEASE don’t think that! 

We are not looking to COMPETE with the 400+ other social networks - but to work WITH them.  The only folks who would want to come in and be members of the original mother ship PeopleAggregator are the (so called) Arrington 51k (now up to 82k.)  The early adopters, the nerds who love to come in and kick tires - early.

So THEY can tell their grandchildren (one day) - I was an original member of the PeopleAggregator.  Sort of like how I was an original member of Friednster, Tribe, MySpace, Multiply, Orkut, AlwaysOn and 1UP.

So if we’re not positioning PeepAgg to end-users - then who?

1.  Well first its the people who we make money off of.  OTHER software developers, potential network operators, businesses who wish to get involved with and offer social networking to particular niche markets, sports teams, music labels, movie studios, publishers, hardware vendors, governemental agencies, consumer brands, you name it.  We see ourselves (along with other companies like GoingOn networks) as suppliers of social networking to corporations.

2.  So we make money from #1 - but we partner with #2 - which are the web services vendors, Live Web purveyors who share the vision with us of an inter-connected distributed meshed world. One example might be an ad agency which has APIs available into their ad network and which can allow us to selectively target ads to our customers customers.  Or media repository vendors - who will store all those videos and images for our end-users, so we don’t have to pay for the bandwidth.  Or all those new kind of aggregators (Like dabble or Plum) and dashboards (like Pageflakes and NetVibes) - I mean how can we POSSIBLY compete with all these folks!

By defintion we have to partner with them.

So please understand the positioning of PeopleAggregator.  We’re working on our public presentations - but here’s the first passes of them - at PeopleAggregator.com.

And thanks to Richard - brilliant as ever.

And as I say in the comments - to Randy Morin - YES we’ll have both FOAF and XFN/hCard import/export - soon!

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