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.
August 12th, 2007 11:32
[...] So hands down, the Faceroll thing is much easier to remember than looking at a random IP address or top level domains in your referal logs. It’s a great way to get to know your audience. The other great thing is that your visitors that are coming to you from MyBlogLog all have websites they claimed. You get to not only put a face to a visitor, you also get to see what they write about, what sites they like to visit, and who visits them. Of course this all means that to be an upstanding member of a community, you need to have a website that features MyBlogLog – goodbye inbox, we are now shifting the conversation over to comments & trackbacks. As MySpace taught us, no one sends email anymore, all casual conversation takes place on each other’s friends pages. MyBlogLog enables any website anywhere to become your own friends page – hello inbox 2.0! [...]
November 16th, 2007 02:21
Two new studies show why some people are more attractive for members of the opposite sex than others.
The University of Florida, Florida State University found that physically attractive people almost instantly attract the attention of the interlocutor, sobesednitsy with them, literally, it is difficult to make eye. This conclusion was reached by a series of psychological experiments, which were determined by the people who believe in sending the first seconds after the acquaintance. Here, a curious feature: single, unmarried experimental preferred to look at the guys, beauty opposite sex, and family, people most often by representatives of their sex.
The authors believe that this feature developed a behavior as a result of the evolution: a man trying to find a decent pair to acquire offspring. If this is resolved, he wondered potential rivals. Detailed information about this magazine will be published Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In turn, a joint study of the Rockefeller University, Rockefeller University and Duke University, Duke University in North Carolina revealed that women are perceived differently by men smell. During experiments studied the perception of women one of the ingredients of male pheromone-androstenona smell, which is contained in urine or sweat.
The results were startling: women are part of this repugnant odor, and the other part is very attractive, resembling the smell of vanilla, and the third group have not felt any smell. The authors argue that the reason is that the differences in the receptor responsible for the olfactory system, from different people are different.
It has long been proven that mammals (including human) odor is one way of attracting the attention of representatives of the opposite sex. A detailed article about the journal Nature will publish.
December 15th, 2007 11:33
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce