3 Ways to Aggregate Your Identity
June 29th, 2007 (12:00pm) Mike Gunderloy 24 CommentsTweet This (1)
LinkedIn, FaceBook, Blogger, Twitter, Jaiku…these days it’s not unusual for web workers to maintain membership in multiple online communities. The problem with this is that at some point you hit a level of diminishing returns: you can spend so much time managing and maintaining your online identity that you can’t actually get any work done or remember which contacts you met where. As always, one person’s problem is another’s opportunity, and now we’re seeing a number of attempts at identity aggregation: sites and services that promise one-stop management of all of your social networking. Here are three of the players in this new space.
ProfileLinker supports over 75 different networks, ranging from the big names like LinkedIn and Flickr to more obscure online locales such as Catster and Amie Street. After creating your ProfileLinker account, you then enter the details of your other accounts, creating a sort of master directory entry. ProfileLinker offers search services, so you can find other people (or they can find you) across all the various networks they support. The biggest advantage of ProfileLinker is that it probably includes the networks you’re interested in, but without any sort of aggregated online page it’s not clear that it’s worth the effort of re-entering your data.
8hands currently supports Twitter, Flickr, a variety of hosted blogging services including Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad, YouTube, and a few others. Support for FaceBook, Friendster and more is promised in the “coming soon” category. Even though it’s working with a Web 2.0 world, 8hands itself is a desktop application (Windows now, Mac promised). After creating an account and entering your details for the supported services, 8hands gives you a desktop window that resembles an instant messaging client – indeed, one of the things you can do is start a chat session with other 8hands users on any of your networks. You can also see things as they’re added to your networks (think of this as a specialized RSS reader), and share content from networks to users by drag and drop. The key problem here is that the application is most useful only if your friends are members of your social networks and 8hands users, so there’s a double adoption curve to consider.
MyLifeBrand lets you manage multiple social networks, including LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, FriendSter, and others, in a single unified web interface. The service is currently in closed alpha, and you need an invitation to join. If and when you get in, you’ll find your other communities running in frames within the MyLifeBrand shell. They also maintain a single master friends list for you, so you can stop worrying about which people you know where.
So far, I think, we’re in the early days of social network and identity aggregation. While these three services are interesting for what they do, I don’t think any of them has hit the sweet spot that will enable massive uptake just yet. As with the social networks themselves, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here: these aggregated services will become useful only if they get a large number of users, but they won’t get a large number of users unless they’re useful. I’m still waiting for the killer feature set that would get me to pull together and re-enter all of my account information yet again – how about you?
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I’m with you all the way – I’m getting Social Networking fatigue, but can’t yet see the point of an aggregation service yet.
I have a feeling some of these SN sites will merge or close down before a good aggregator comes along!
Wink lets you provide a link to all of your profiles and any of your friends that are on wink specifically it will let you know what they have changed and updated. I haven’t done much with it yet. It would be nice though to have 1 thing to check.
Funny, I was just thinking of the exact same thing when I was walking back home today. Looks like the killer identity aggregator hasn’t been made yet, and we need one more than ever.
Maybe at some point someone should look into http://www.istalkr.com which is about the same.
Mike,
Thanks for joining our site ProfileLinker.com. We now support 100 social networks and adding new networks as they spring up. The main purpose of ProfileLinker is to make social networking and the management of multiple profiles easier to manage. It’s a simple process of entering your social network information and we aggregate all your information, friends, etc. Just wanted to comment on a couple of points from the review.
“The biggest advantage of ProfileLinker is that it probably includes the networks you’re interested in, but without any sort of aggregated online page it’s not clear that it’s worth the effort of re-entering your data.”
You raise a good point. Once you enter all your information about your other social networks, we take this information and important all your friends and messages. This data entry process is only needed once. After this when you log into ProfileLinker we’ll give you updates across ALL your social networks. Things such as who updated their photo or who added a new video on youtube.
We tend to focus on less work for the end user and more on the management side of multiple profiles. How many times do you log into a network just to check if you have notes and it turns out you have 0? How many times do you go to MySpace.com and know who actually updated their myspace page? Speaking for myself this happens quite often. The beauty of ProfileLinker.com is that it gives you these updates in a clear and concise format. We’re adding some new notifications that will make this more clear and I’ll keep you posted on when these changes roll out. In that phase is a one page snapshot of what’s going on across all your networks. However, till then similar functionality is found on the Social Network feed on the main page once you log in.
Let me know if you have any other questions and I’ll be free to chat via phone as well.
-Brian |Co-Founder | http://www.ProfileLinker.com
Social networking sites have the same problems as IM’s. Too many of the damn things. The whole web 2.0 fad has just made life more difficult.. you go to a page such as WordPress.com’s FAQ page and instead of a list of FAQ’s you get lots of words, disassembled and meaningless. I can’t wait for web 3.0 where people become sensible and put information into a readable format again. Just out of curiosity isn’t your own personal website supposed to be an aggregation of your identity? The place where it all ties together?.. just a thought.
This all sounds really interesting.
I have hesitated to get involved with Social Networking, even though it is considered such an “opportunity” for marketers on the Net, because I saw it as a huge time-sinkhole.
With this article, maybe there is some light, that will save my time for the best aspects of Social Networking, and not the drudge work.
I appreciated Brian Dixon writing with a response. Not having seen the site yet, I do not know if the one page he mentions is helpful, but I DID appreciate his input. It encouraged me to check out ProfileLinker’s service.
How does one “get” an invitation to MyLifeBrand … anyone with “connections”?
I will try to watch this subject and hope that you will update it here, as I am interested in starting Social Networking, but as part of a Business, not just for fun.
If anyone has suggestions for the best networks for this, please come to my blog to mention them. Thanks.
Best to all — Em
PS Please visit my blog: http://diabetesdietdialogue.wordpress.com
“Everyone knows someone who needs this information.” (TM)
Use it for Prevention and for Sharing.
I don’t even know what a person that aggregate does?
suppose.wordpress.com
I think the problem with identity aggregation is with the networks themselves – what we need is an identity aggregator based on dimensions of an identity – more thoughts here on my blog: http://www.chanduthota.com/blog/2007/06/on-identity-aggregation.html
Cheers,
Chandu Thota
http://www.fatdoor.com
Or you just use profileomat.com ;-)
These sound very promising indeed. I have very slowly adopted (adapted to?) any social networking serviuce because of the issue that these services address: So many services and yet only one me updating each one. I have 3 kids, a wife, and a full time job, so I have precious little time to spare for social networking sites regardless of how much I want to join in the fun. But if the aggregators listed really do allow me to manage them all in one spot, then it’s game on!
Thanks for the coverage. We cannot tell you how resounding the response has been from people signing up who are frustrated with managing multiple social networks. We are finding on average they belong to 3 social networks with some in the area of 10 networks,
What I believe we do in a rich media way with MyLifeBrand is provide the ability not only to aggregate social networks which lets you navigate them within our social style browser but when set up once you are auto-logged in every time thereafter, so in fact we are sparing people the trouble of repeatedly logging in as well as navigating and managing multiple internet windows. Additionally though our platform users will be able to publish out to all their social networks their content so they have a centralized place for the publishing all of their social network content.
Also, our platform enables your friends across social networks to be imported in and once done so you can message them to to their social network email individually or broadcast to all of them.
Finally as far as scaling i invite you talk with us as you would see we have in fact thought about that issue, and we have begun to in fact to scale. We are doing so with community partners who have large installed passionate member bases in need of a rich social platform like ours for their members.
I really to urge you to take a look at not only what we do but how we are doing it and with whom. The speedy overview does not do it justice.
Thanks again for the coverage!
Danny
EVP
Best domain name goes to http://profilactic.com/ (but it’s slow).
Best aggregator I have found is tumblr
http://engtech.tumblr.com
Mike,
Thank you for reviewing our product 8hands.
The main difference between 8hands and the other services you mentioned,
is that 8hands is the only aggregator that gives you real time
notifications even when you’re off-site so you can focus on doing
other stuff and be more productive. Most of the time, all you
need is a brief summary of a social network event, just a glance on a “headline”
to keep you in the know. The desktop experience is much more suitable for this
kind of interaction. The other profile aggregators still force the ritual of
continuously visiting a web profile.
Also, we’ve started working on a mobile version of 8hands, on integration
of notifications from various web mail services and of course, on integration of
many more social networks.
Stay tuned,
Maya.