The Problem With Profile Aggregators
One of the next great things on the web seems to be profile aggregators that somehow bring all of your online profiles together so that you don’t get confused as to where you have been. At least I think that is the point of them, however many of the ones that I have looked at seem to be missing one important thing. The social aspect of all the communities that people join.
Sure we may all join too many Social Networks and have accounts at more places than we can remember, but I’m pretty sure we don’t forget the places that get the job done for us. If you have an account on MySpace, Facebook and Digg are you going to invite people to view your people aggregated profile or look for them at each of those services? Profile aggregators attempt to fix a the problem of making our lives simpler, but these Social Networks aren’t making our lives harder.
So what problem should they be solving?
Well first if you have no idea what I am referring to when I say “profile aggregators”, Frank Gruber has an excellent roundup of a number of them out there. Now that we got that out the way let’s look at problems that we could be solving.
Actually this is as far as I can take things because I honestly don’t know a huge problem that social networks. I don’t have people asking me for all of my identities across them and I don’t find myself needing a spot to see what stuff I have been up to on these sites. Honestly though last year I thought that the idea was brilliant because initially it makes sense. Bring all your identities together, but all that does is try to take away the uniqueness of each one.
If your problem is you don’t have enough time for 3 different social networks then the solution isn’t to use a profile aggregator, but to simply stop using 3 different social networks. Maybe these sites think that they can become a better social network than the social networks you love and use and if that’s the case they need to start all over again.
The irony though of adding any social aspects to these kinds of sites is that essentially you are creating another identity that you have to keep track of. So its great that you pulled all of your social information onto one page and now you can use just one site to keep track of all your identities, but then you are just creating another identity so do you need another site to control that one?
There is a space for these kinds of sites though and it will be interesting to see who comes out on top. However, when there are at least ten of them already there isn’t really any point to using one of them. For now though I think it is best you focus on creating a social experience that does things better than what is currently out there.
Related reading:
I see the problem with profile aggregators is that they solve a problem that no one actually has. People who keep user profiles at multiple “social networking” sites do so because they like those sites and use them, and they have more value to them than simply holding some of their personal information. I use Flickr not to just hold my photos but to explore the millions of community photos, leave comments, and tag my friends’ uploads. I use Digg because I like having an impact on the stories that show up there, Facebook because it allows me to connect with others, and around it goes.
These profile aggregators are leech applications, they don’t provide any real reason for people to use them besides mashing together various online profiles, a feat which takes only a handful of code that a braindead developer could write in a day or two. The barrier to enter the “online profile aggregator” market is so incredibly low that you see a dozen services all doing the same exact thing pop up within only a few months of the first, thus showing how little unique value these services offer.
When your company does absolutely everything that another company does but adds “support for one more service” then you know you’re in the wrong market or approaching the solution from the wrong angle. Just like with all the Ajax-enabled homepages, the profile aggregators are locked in this unwinnable game of one-upsmanship that has them focusing on the wrong things.
Any investors who put money into these sorts of things only do so because they lament the fact they missed investing into one of the startups that these profile aggregators… aggregate. When you buy into a market you’re looking for Saks Fifth Avenue or Macy’s, not K-Mart or Kohl’s, and that’s what these profile aggregators are.
By Mike Rundle on February 2, 2007 1:22 am
First, I want to say that while I had heard about and signed up for ClaimID a few months back, I didn’t know there were enough aggregators to warrant a round up.
A long time ago I bought my name as a domain name and I’ve been using it for what I’ve been calling my presence gateway, which is an unordered list of the various places where I hold accounts. I see many other people using their MySpace accounts to list other profile names they care about. Therefore I too do not see a problem dictating the need for a service to create a list of the places I hold accounts.
I strongly agree, Mike. :)
To me, I think profile aggregators point to the need for a globally recognized identity system that manages permissions. It is truly annoying to have to remember so many passwords and to have to login to each community separately. People are trying to solve that problem, but I don’t want some corporate sponsored system like Microsoft Live ID and OpenID isn’t mature enough yet.
By Justin Kistner on February 2, 2007 4:17 am
I agree that aggregators are a solution in need of a problem, but taken from the perspective of the friend, the “other or the visitor to the user’s profile page - there is a clearly defined need. The need to know or at least desire to know where else on the web this person resides, how they invest their time, what they’re into. For example, this is my first time on wisdump, got here from 9rules, knew about ScrivsTyme, didn’t know about oreo or myspace.com/9rules. I know a lot more about Scrivs now, but it took a lot of work. Much respect, M
By Matthew Stotts on February 2, 2007 4:36 am
I can see profile aggregators being useful for people who don’t have a URL to represent themselves; kind of like a biography of one’s self on the web. MySpace fills this capacity for a lot of people, and Facebook for others, but those are more of communities. Then again, the current run of “profile aggregators” don’t really give people enough control, and as you said, without an internal community for people to participate in, there isn’t much there to attract people. They could just as well flop entirely.
By Montoya on February 8, 2007 10:34 pm
The site http://www.profilefly.com is attempt to bring the social element back to social networking bookmark/aggregator sites. By combining a minimal profile, and community elements, it helps to prevent the over-technical look some tagging sites have that throw off your typical Myspace/Facebook user.
By Mike on April 4, 2007 5:47 pm