When does the aggregating of people begin?
I had someone come up to me at the SFWIN geek scene last week asking for the ability to keep track of certain people - by scraping their profiles out of MySpace and other SNS. She seemed to want to do market research and study the behavior patterns, blogging styles and other representational activity of certain people. At no time did she think she was intruding into these people’s lives, as these were public profiles and content she wanted to monitor.
Then tonight I had someone ask me - “when do you start aggregating people together?” First I answered him talking about ’subscribing to people and a compound feed of all of one’s stuff.” But then I realized that both of these inquiries were based upon the fact that we call our product the PeopleAggregator.
Since aggregation today means bringing together all sorts of RSS feeds into one interface, I guess people think that’s what our product will ultimately do. Maybe we will do something like that with some sort of fancy microcontent aggregator (Phil’s had the basic code for years) but I’m afraid there’s a basic disaconnect going - which I want to correct right now.
I’ve had lots of advice to change the name of the product, as it doesn’t do what the title says it’s supposed to do But that’s OK. Not everything works out perfectly like that.
Tomorrow I meet with a bunch of Yahoo people and since I’ve just done a bunch of demos recently, I’m starting to really hone in on the message and what the PeopleAggregator is all about:
”PeopleAggregator is not an end-user SNS, its technology to create and run your own SNS. MySpace in a box.”
“There are three ways to use the technology: as an end-user, by getting a hosted network or by setting and running your own service with a download copy of our code.”
“Destroy the giant centralized SNS cartels - with 10,000’s of SNS.”
“Be your own Oligarch, control who’s in the network, what the content and rules are.”
“Inter-connect together social networks together via open standards.”
“We have two kinds of APIs: web service calls for mashups (REST and XML-RPC) and low level php5 calls. Everything you see at PeopleAggregator.net is calling those php5 APIs.”
So now I think its time to answer the issue of “When does the aggregating of people begin?”
I’ll never forget first hearing about the Fakesters being booted out of Friendster. Their first appearance had not been more than 4 months ago, when they first started naturally evolved out of the chaos that was Friendster in the early days.
These fake persona were not anticipated by Jonathan Abrams et al, so they reacted to them - by banning them and killing off the accounts. I still wonder what would have happened if Jonathan would have allowed those fakester accounts to evolve and be left alone.
When I think about what the PeopleAggregator - “is supposed to do” - I realize that it is not the role of its vendor to define that. The community has to. In fact I think I’m opposed to defining “this is what you do with this product.” I think the time when the vendor does that - is gone by.
We didn’t say “this is how to use Director”. We showed lots of different kinds of examples, but no matter what we produced ourselves, we were always out done by our end-users. A good tool can be used in a myraid of ways, if its designed properly.
So let me be clear and repeat myself. The community will define what People Aggregation is - and not the vendor. At least not THIS vendor.
PeopleAggregator is not about subscribing to and bringing together people in some interface. That may be something it can do, but that’s not what its about.
SNS have proven to be underlying infrastructure that enable people to meet each other, mate, have fun, flirt, communicate, monitor, stalk, brag about, subscribe to, proudly strut their feathers and in general - be social and voyeuristic. Lots of people are studying this behavior and monetizing this phenomena.I’m betting that for every feature we invent, they’ll be 10 more requested. Great products like Multiply, Tagworld and Frappr are pushing the envelope - trying out new things - and hopefully - establishing new open standards around them. We’re gonna continue to add new modules and functionality, while at the same time build out all sorts of projects for our customers - showing new ways to make money.The most succesful new social networks will be those that are sponsor driven - from day one. Like Nike’s, or specificSports teams or off-shoots of existing brands. Social networks are vehciels ot people’s hearts and souls - and they’re not that expensive to create and run (especially now that we’re LIVE and source code is available.)
Aggregating people CAN be about pulling their profiles into one place, but it could also be about creating blog objects that bring together all your accounts in one place (like ProfileLinker does) or center itself around some underlying construct - like cars, movies, videogames or songs People aggregating could mean the opposite of aggregating people - like some magnetic force that pushes things away from you - instead of constantly sucking things in.
One thing I know FOR SURE! People aggregating won’t be one thing. It’ll mean - in general - the act of interconnecting profile records of individuals, groups and entire networks in new powerful fun ways.
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