October 2009: Matthew logs onto his social aggregation service. In front of him appears everything his friends have been doing across every different social networking service. He decides that he needs to write a few blog posts, upload some photos, and comment on a few threads. He clicks on the menu in his aggregation service and off he goes, uploading photos to MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Picasa Web Albums, .Mac and Bebo all from the one screen. Then there’s that party he wants to invite people to: he sets up an event and adds the friends he wants to invite. Details of the party and invites are posted on evite, Socializr and Facebook, with RSVPs from all being tracked by the aggregator.
Does this sound like any service available today? It doesn’t, and yet this is the social network of tomorrow, social network 2.0.
There’s been a lot of talk around FriendFeed being the next Google, and yet it’s not quite there yet. FriendFeed aggregates the data in, but so far the only place you can post out of FriendFeed is Twitter. FriendFeed is however continually evolving and will change in time. The guys running FriendFeed are smart (and ex-Googlers as well) so they will already know that social network 2.0 is the end game. The bigger question though is can they get there in time? Google is still the 1000 pound gorilla
The only company that has come close to meeting the description above is Google with the yet unlaunched Socialstream . The video below shows how one central network can be used as the hub for external services, perhaps not perfectly, but the content generation outwards is there. Google’s Friend Connect and Open Social is all about laying a common data foundation for a service like Socialstream. Google knows it can’t win social networks 1.0, but it’s well placed to become the two-way social aggregation tool of the future.
Competition
We know that the two main players in the race to social network 2.0 are Google and FriendFeed, but as yet we don’t know who else is aiming to deliver in this space. I’d suggest that Facebook and MySpace in particular are not going to sit back and allow Google to create an two way aggregation hub without themselves being in the race. We’re seeing the start of the cold war between Google and Facebook now, with Facebook blocking access to Google’s Friend Connect service. Facebook claims the reason is privacy but ultimately what Friend Connect represents is the dawn of the aggregation services, the ability to pull and push information to and from multiple social networks. MySpace has thrown its weight behind Open Social, but is absent from Friend Connect. Could MySpace see Friend Connect as the start of the broader threat from Google?
My guess is that Facebook is trying to group as many startups around a compatible layer, perhaps via their platform, so that in the future they’ll start aggregation services as well (the basics are already there through mini-feeds). MySpace, with the backing of News/ FIM will be heading in the same direction, both via in part supporting the standards set by Google, but holding back at the end so they can start cutting direct deals as well.
Conclusion
The opening scenario isn’t that far fetched and it’s definitely the direction we are heading in. The walled gardens of 1.0 are slowing coming down, with movements such as OpenID and DataPortability, and even Google’s Open Social establishing cross platform data compatibility. Ultimately the aggregation model presented today by FriendFeed will expand into ubiquitous two way communication across multiple platforms. Google became the starting point for search, who will become the starting point for social networking tomorrow??
