The Prettier Side of Aggregation
Jeffrey Zeldman’s article, The vanishing personal site, brings to light what many of us have been wondering about in the back of our heads for a while now. Social networks that provide features often found in a personal website captured our fancies and stretched our virtual personas in all directions. That goes for both the knowledgeable and not so knowledgeable in web development.
The Question
It’s not really a bad thing, which Zeldman also stresses. The question is, now that you’ve scattered yourself all over the place, how are you going to put yourself back together?
Not that you need to; I’m sure not everyone would be interested in painstakingly picking up the pieces one by one and gluing them together. That’s why FriendFeed became an instant hit. But if you ask me, using another social network to put them all together does not feel good. Not one bit. I’d consider it another convenient (even organic) way to spread my own content. But that’s it. I still dream of the day I manage to tastefully put my stuff together in one place. Like these websites:
Jeff Croft and Denna Jones
Truth is, Jeff Croft’s recent site redesign is more than an exercise in consolidating “stuff”. It also experiments with CSS3 (view it in Safari) and prides itself with fancy Tufte-style bar graphs on the sidebar. Lots of API-wrangling here, from Flickr (with photo-cropping to boot) to Google Maps to Upcoming to Authentic Jobs.
Denna Jones’s website behaves like a portfolio up front, but as Jon Tan relates, practically everything on the site is extracted from elsewhere. The header is made up of the basic blurb placed on top of a photo from Denna’s Flickr account. This gives a dynamic, interactive, and personal feel all at the same time.
Coming Together
Although an out of the box solution like FriendFeed seems like a godsend, those who care about a great user experience will find a better way to present content from several external sources. Will doing so become an easier task? Let’s hope so, at least by some degree.
This is interesting. I redesigned my personal blog a couple of weeks ago, and one of my primary concerns was to aggregate parts of my social media presence and integrate them with my site.
Because I’m using Drupal, it wasn’t difficult to aggregate my StumbleUpon recent posts and my latest Twitter entries in the sidebar. It’s nice to know that I can use these services and have them automatically update on the site, especially the microblogging side of things.
I actually like integrating my StumbleUpon entries, because it proves that I’m backing up my votes with a (temporary) link in my sidebar.
So, as usual, IA, your post came at a poignant time. I’d love to know what you think of the site redesign if you get a minute to follow my link!
By Gerard on April 29, 2008 8:30 pm
I’ve been thinking along similar lines recently, but to be honest, I’m not a big fan of most of those social networking sites out there, so this doesn’t represent a problem to me.
By unwesen on May 1, 2008 8:17 am