Comments on: Facebook as Social Aggregator

By: Brendan Lally

Brendan Lally — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:01:59 +0000

Points taken– time will tell
As Marc indicated FC will be on of the first DLA’s to push the openness but … time will tell..

I’ve a few grey hairs remembering the days of Prodify, CIS etc.. so seen “some” of this b4..

Lal

By: Gareth

Gareth — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:37:28 +0000

Brendan, I think Facebook have a better chance of becoming the primary feed aggregator than you might imagine, due to the fact that RSS is still an alien concept to most web users.

If facebook continues to grow at its current rate, getting into the 100 million user area by next year - and manages to leverage it’s high usability and social maps to ease users into feed creation and sharing; they could have a much better chance of developing into the dominant aggregator than existing dedicated aggregator apps - none of which, as you point out, work particularly well right now.

Check out Mark Canter’s thoughts.

By: Brendan Lally

Brendan Lally — Wed, 30 May 2007 16:56:35 +0000

Gareth,

I agree with most of your thoughts above and certainly FB is doing a LOT more than the other SN’s.

Opening up their API is going 2b a huge win for them and certainly dev’ers etc. will create some cool appls and top-ups.

However I don’t c them becoming an aggregator. There are several out there already and all do a so-and-so job but only about 20% of whats really needed.
The 100% aggregator is not going 2 exist until their is ‘openness’ across all the major SN’s. FC is starting by opening the gate from their walled garden.
Whose next?

Lal

By: James Corbett

James Corbett — Tue, 29 May 2007 12:10:16 +0000

Great analysis Gareth. Facebooks seems to me to represent the first convergence of social graphs, lifestreaming and attention. It will be intriguing to see where it all goes…