People are tired of checking all their constantly-multiplying accounts online. They used to be eager to sign up for cool new services on the Web. Now they’re annoyed by having to check “yet another social networking service,” yet another blog, yet another social media site. When your life is inundated with logins to remember and channels to maintain, who wants another?
A lot of new Web services are trying to tap into that frustration. People seem to want one site that lets them see and manage what’s going on everywhere. From Tumblr to Facebook to Pipes to Nutshell Mail, every social site or service on the Web now wants to be the portal that allows you to manage your accounts from every other site or service. You can manage all or part of your account on Twitter from Tumblr, Tumblr from Facebook, Facebook from Gmail (via Nutshell), Gmail from Buzz, Buzz from Google Reader, and so on and so forth. Industry observers and scholars from John Battelle to Joe Turow [PDF] have commented on the tortured history of the Web portal, but say what you will, the portal impulse is on the rise yet again.
Amid my very partial list above, the latest service that hopes to help you manage everything is Buzz, of course. And what’s interesting is that the impulse to put everything in one place is driving some early conflicts on the site. I got into a fascinating discussion about this recently. People all seem to want to aggregate their content in one spot—but the spot they choose has implications for others in their respective social networks. And the consequences aren’t always pretty.
For instance, while Buzz and Twitter one day hope to aggregate your entire digital life, a simple early exemplar is the relationship between these two particular services. Twitter feeds can be aggregated to Buzz. Buzz feeds can, with some extra steps, be aggregated to Twitter. And users are doing either or both things. The catch is that many of them aren’t checking both accounts—they want the simplicity of having everything in one place, remember? And the experience of following a regular Twitter user on Buzz can be a painful one. Scores of posts get dumped into your Buzz account, cluttering your experience with the site. The users from whom they originate may never visit Buzz to see comments on their posts, resulting in a one-way conversation that’s anathema to any social media site. And this isn’t to pick on Twitter users. I’m sure Buzz adopters who feed their posts to Twitter are creating a similar experience on the other end.
Feed aggregation, in its finest form results in what one Buzz user called a digital “estuary.” Ideally, friends can look at Buzz or your Twitter feed or your Google Reader items or your Facebook profile, and see everything you’ve chosen to share from across the Web. These things become conversation starters and community builders. Everyone’s experience is enriched. But combined feeds can just as easily be a landfill. A dumping ground (or politely, a “termination point,” as another Buzz user put it) for content that you never visit and never attend to, much to the chagrin of everyone else who can’t converse with you about it, or may not want to see it in the first place.
In short, I’d suggest developers considering feed aggregation services need to think more carefully about the different motivations people have for aggregating content—whether they’re likely to create an estuary or a landfill. A good example of this sort of foresight is the Salmon protocol, a standard in which Google and others are investing resources, which will allow comments and responses to move freely across the Web, from one service to another, along with the original posts. In other words, we can carry on a common conversation about the same Tweet, Buzz, or post wherever we happen to be viewing it. Of course, that also means more privacy headaches and concerns as privacy restrictions will have to be managed on not one, but across many services. I like to call the cycle innovation-trepidation-saturation-regulation. And it will continue.
