Social Network Evolution
Twitter is dead, long live Twitter FriendFeed. That seems to sum up the general sentiment floating around this weekend. After months of troubled operation, many Twitter users are jumping over to FriendFeed. We’ve seen the social media mass exodus before, I imagine will see it a few more times still. FriendFeed does have one distinct advantage, why switch to yet another service when you can simply import it into FriendFeed?
I keep saying that aggregation is the future of social media, or at least the next step. While attempting to look forward, lets look back as well. For that I give you the evolution of social networks, or at least from experience.
Disconnected Me
The lonely days, the dial-up days, the disconnected days. Sure we had things like BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) and Usenet but connections were difficult to forge. BBSs went multi-node and services like AOL increased social connections to some degree. E-mail and on the fly chat rooms provided the best avenues for communication. This eventually grew to include message boards and various types of profile based websites.
Friendship Redesigned
Taking a few steps ahead of the very first social networks (classmates.com was one of them) we find our selves at Friendster. I’ll never forget how simply out right confused I was by the whole concept. It was my first experience where you *HAD* to build friendship connections to really use the site. As you built your social network you could further peel back its layers, look at friends of your friends and so forth. It was this onion like setup that made the services so interesting, and of course a massive time suck.
Social Network Fatigue
Evolving further, social networking web sites are everywhere. Two major players emerge in the form of MySpace and Facebook. Today they are now even part of popular culture. We begin to see tons of services launch with social networking features. Some of us run to each new service, play around for a bit and then quickly abandon it. Many social networks begin to look like ghost towns, littered with millions of long forgotten profiles. Most “normal” users find one particular network that appeals to them, making it their online home. These types of users don’t even want to think about joining other social networks, they just don’t have the time, energy or interest.
Aggregated Me
Now here we are today, our online impressions spread well across the internets. Services like FriendFeed are making it much easier follow your friends. In fact, following is becoming a preferred mechanism to friending someone. Data (activity) is starting to move around more freely thanks in part to things like RSS, Dataportibility and APIs. Lifecasting in whatever medium has never been easier. Twitter becomes a joke on The Daily Show as these services trickle down into mainstream usage.
Whats Next
I can’t tell you the next step in social network evolution, but I can tell you what I’d like to see. I’d much rather that central hub be something I control. A type of service or technology I can deploy and manage from my own domain. A decentralized me where people could follow and interact. As wonderful as FriendFeed is, I can’t help but feel I’m jumping to yet another online rental property. Personally, I’d rather own the home myself.
That said, please follow me on FriendFeed. 
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 20 people and commented on 17 times 
June 30th, 2008 at 12:26 am
The beauty is in the fact that lifestream aggregators like FriendFeed make your entire social network somewhat portable (via the import feature as you mentioned). Without network portability people wouldn’t be moving as fast; they want to be where their friends are. Just so happens that their friends are already in Friendfeed
June 30th, 2008 at 12:31 am
Oh forgot to mention, I’ve added the FriendFeed Wordpress plugin here as well.
Portability FTW
June 30th, 2008 at 1:25 am
I liked your fractal analogy here. And it really does feel like things are subdividing and there’s constantly a need for an even bigger aggregator.
As long as the aggregator on top is generating new content though, there will always be a need for an even bigger meta-aggregator, lol.
BTW, nice styling of the FF comments plugin, but it doesn’t seem to be noticing that there is a lot of activity on your entry on friendfeed…?
June 30th, 2008 at 1:51 am
Sean: I believe the future of social networking must rest in the hands of the individual who must control his/her identity on a server located in his/her home. I’ve proposed an idea and new product line to a major technology manufacturer that is aimed at making this a reality. Web developers are welcome to help me make this happen!!
June 30th, 2008 at 2:20 am
@J Phil
Ya the plugin seems to take some time to “catch up” to FF.
The plugin doesnt have much in the way of styling, I hacked it quite a bit for this. Also removed the comment to friendfeed form. Too cluttered and requires a login.
June 30th, 2008 at 3:07 am
Pretty solid analysis, dude. I’m still wondering why the great migration happened all in one weekend though… care to speculate?
June 30th, 2008 at 3:11 am
Ya after a week of the replies being down users couldn’t have good conversations. This has become a huge part of the site, also something FF does MUCH better.
June 30th, 2008 at 3:13 am
From FF comment, re my last point.
Check out http://noserub.com/
June 30th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
There is one element I don’t hear being talked much about by the technology or marketing folks. There are a lot of people in my world who have, for example, one user name in one online community of college friends, a different identity in a gaming community, a third persona in a professional context, and and have a different circle of intimate friends and family. How do you aggregate these multiple identities without causing them to elide?
I try to explain Twitter or Meetup to my family and they just don’t understand it or the level of trust people have with setting up meetings with people they only know online. In certain businesses, people merge their offline and online identities but on some bulletin boards and in some discussion groups I’ve participated in for over 10 years, I still don’t know the real names of some people whom I otherwise know a lot about. The get-togethers we’ve had have been some of the best social occasions I’ve attended but it took months and sometimes years of interaction before they occurred.
I realize there are generational differences but successful technology should be able to aggregate distinct, multiple identities and allow the user to access their data without it being in a public stream. In other words, I’d like to stay connected with the people I work with, but they don’t need to see my Tweets!
June 30th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
To answer your parting query, Sean, the next step in the evolution of social media is having a centralized “dashboard” for your online identity. No more filling out profile after profile, going to FriendFeed, adding the service, and repeating for each of the hundreds and thousands of socially-enabled websites that will emerge in the coming months and years. If the current phase of social media evolution is aggregating information after it is created, then the next evolution is avoiding fragmentation in the first place. This is the effort being put forth by Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect.
Basically, Google and Facebook want to be the place where you create and manager your social data — bio, friends, pictures, links, etc. The websites that use these two as identity providers will provide value by organizing, using, and growing that information. FriendFeed and other stand-alone aggregators will be irrelevant because identity fragmentation will no longer be a problem to solve.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:37 pm
If you want something like you described in that last bit, its up to you to make it! No one’s going to make a good ’service’ for you. Do it yourself!