After becoming more active FriendFeed user, I have started to realize the direction the social media in the Internet is going.
The “Web 1.0” way was to have mostly closed communities, like forums or membership sites. The content was usually personal and hardly ever shared between other users. There were some personalization benefits for registering, but not much else.
The “Web 2.0” was a step towards more open communities. Sharing the data between users and building social networks became important. Many successful services have opened their APIs to make sharing of the data between tools and services even easier.
Now I think that in the future it won’t be important which service you are using for the some specific task. The more open and usable the service is, the more likely it will be a success. Staying as too closed service, like Facebook, will hurt your service in the long run.
Dissatisfied users want to be able to switch
Lately there have been many outages with Twitter and those that have got bored of seeing the famous Fail Whale have been seeking alternatives for microblogging from services like identi.ca or Pownce.
What prevents many people from changing from Twitter, is that they have built their social network of people they follow and possibly large amount of followers. When you switch services, you have to rebuild the whole network.
What needs to happen is to move the social network from the services to some central aggregation service, like the FriendFeed. There it doesn’t matter what service you (or especially the people you are following) are using for any given task.
If you switch from the Twitter to identi.ca, you won’t lose your followers, as long as they can follow your updates from the FriendFeed. If they don’t happen to have account in the same service, they can comment to your content in the FF.
I like to follow many people, like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray. I don’t necessarily check their blogs or Twitter/identi.ca daily, but from the FriendFeed I can see all the important things (=those that cause discussion). As a bonus, I can see their Flickr, Digg etc updates, too!
Discussion is important
If the topic causes discussion, it can happen in the FriendFeed (thanks to the new commenting feature) or some discussion service like the Disqus. FriendFeed also offers to submit the answer to the original service; at the moment at least to the Twitter.
I think this is very important. If you don’t want to lose the user generated content / discussion, you need to make the APIs two-directional. ATOM/RSS-feeds offer only pulling of the data, but if you want to receive the updates done elsewhere, you’d better provide some REST/JSON/ATOM –API to make bi-directional communication possible.
While writing this blog post, I happened to notice that Rob Diana had guest written this article to Lois Gray’s blog: Can Microblogs Just Talk To Each Other?. Also, Dave Winer wrote about this federation.
I was nice to see that such a big names are thinking among the same lines, which gave me confidence that I maybe onto something, too.
Rob and Dave talk about the federation as a solution and Rob mentions there is a need for some kind of DNS-like service for microblogging. What made me write this post in the first place was the realization that FriendFeed already acts like one – at least to some extent.
Also, I don’t see the need of publishing to multiple locations important, as long as people can find my content. I simply recommend them to follow my FriendFeed. If I switch a service for managing the content, they won’t miss a beat. If the same data is published in many locations, it makes the discussions hard to follow as you’d have to follow actively many services.
With a bit of evolution, FriendFeed could be made the central point of data exchange. When it starts to talk more back to the services, it will be much more valuable to both users and the services. It would act like a message broker that also has its own community.
I’m not just talking about microblogging, but completely different services like Flickr could easily integrate, too. If somebody comments a favorited picture in the FriendFeed, I’m sure the owner of the picture would appreciate to receive the comment under the picture as well. Or a “Like” in FriendFeed could be counted as a favorite in Flickr. As long as there is activity, it doesn’t really matter, where it originates from.
How to make money if everything is distributed?
If members and tools are decentralized and use whatever tools they like to participate, it raises questions about money. How to benefit from the users that are elsewhere?
When RSS feeds and aggregators became popular, many became worried about losing the visitors to the actual site thus losing the advertisement income.
What I have observed, majority still follow the sites using a web browser and only minority reads the comment through the feeds. I think it is because the concept is still too technical for average people so technology geeks are still the primary users. These same people are also unlikely clickers of ads as they probably have ad blockers.
If the service is good and has value, it will gain lot’s of users and as long as there are many users, there will be monetization opportunities. If the money can’t be made from the users, maybe services could start collecting them from each other for additional benefits…
So what should happen?
- Services need to become even more open, especially for allowing pushing of data from outside (they gain by getting more content)
- FriendFeed could invest more into pushing data back to services to make communication more bi-directional. Of course, they already have their API for services to pull data back from the FriendFeed. We also need competing services.
- People should start using FriendFeed –like services to minimize their tight coupling with the actual content services
I also think that Google is aiming for something like this with their OpenSocial. DataPortability.org and Windows Live Mesh could also fit into the big picture, but they require more analyzing.
