2007 Themes: Distributed Aggregation & Identity

Fred W. had an interesting post the other day suggesting user-controlled pages on Flickr that both echoed some things I’ve been thinking about and led me to Scott Karp’s interesting essay on the Death of the User (choice quote: “In most cases ‘users’ in Media 2.0 are defined as the ‘people formerly known as the audience’”).

My own thinking on this stems from my continual amazement at the way MySpace, which many observers rightly note as a tipping point in the mainstreaming of blogging and personal publishing, perhaps even more importantly fuses general communication and content consumption with content publication. MySpace is not just outbound; it is email inbox 2.0. (And people wonder why mobile hasn’t taken off.)

At the same time, services like flickr and YouTube and Twitter, and technologies like tagging and RSS, continue to arrive to serve specific types of content production and community well (or at least interestingly). And those of us that have crossed into this world of personal & social transparency (a rubicon it seems) will inevitably continue to experiment with and invest in the most compelling.

This leads to a three-fold problem: As a user, I want to aggregate the things I consume effectively and across all of my consumption devices and venues. I may want to publish my aggregation in various ways in various media, like a blogroll on my blog, bookmarks on del.icio.us, or an OPML file or attention stream in a conference panel bio. (Thus, “distributed aggregation”.) Also, as I chime in with my comments and ratings and other UGC submissions, this becomes part of the publishing side of the problem as well.

As a publisher, I want to streamline my production across many points of access while providing a good, unified experience to some members of my audience. I may want to be able to control my profile pages at Flickr and other places - both to reflect my self-expression goals and to capture data that lets me know how I’m doing - but I don’t want to be responsible for maintaining 13 websites. I want the principle of “write once / publish many” to apply not only to my blog posts, but also to my preferences as a publisher. Thus, aggregated distribution.

Finally, from the point of view of efficiency and value-creation, there is a lot of interesting attention that could be harnessed (and fat in the system that could be eliminated) for the benefit of advertisers, knowledge-aggregation companies like Yahoo! and Google, and, more generally, anyone who wants to communicate with like audiences either in niches or en masse (i.e., media) efficiently. Again, aggregated distribution.

There are more than a few companies playing successfully at solving parts of these problems - NetVibes, and TACODA come to mind along with others, as do features introduced by Yahoo! and Google to blend some aspects of communication (mail and IM, email and RSS). There have also been some interesting attempts that haven’t quite taken root (e.g., Rojo). But there’s a lot left to do to solve the problem of “distributed aggregation” of content publishing, and I think this is a problem that will continue to resonate and drive valuable innovation this year.

Related to this problem of course is the need for an effective way to manage identity and privacy: it’s easy for me if I can have one list of friends not 12, but I don’t want all my business friends to see all of my flickr posts, I probably don’t want all of my business research behaviors impacting my behaviorally targeted advertising, and I certainly don’t want to publish my bookmarks and shopping behaviors related to sensitive personal topics. At the same time, managing preferences and terminology across all the different social venues I participate in is a pain in the ass.

I would expect some interesting entries that come at this problem in ways we haven’t seen before (and probably also better, easier-to-use versions of things we have). I would also expect some of the GEMAYA properties and “anchor tenants” in the core related businesses (UGC, news and content aggregation, search, advertising) to make moves toward more effectively meshing content production, consumption, and identity. Hopefully, there will be both good internal innovation here and plenty of interesting M&A opportunities.

Finally, I’m gonna go ahead and make one actual prediction: that at least one “unexpected” large company will participate impactfully in this reader/publisher/attention/identity fabric.