Trends to Note in the Search Industry - Aggregating the Flocks
(Page 3 of 4 )
Of course this moves us smoothly from the topic of social search engines to social sites. With Google offering up OpenSocial and Yahoo joining it recently, we’re going to see a lot more sharing between these sites. This is potentially a very good thing.
I’m actually pretty tame and timid when it comes to social sites of various stripes, but I belong to several: LiveJournal, LinkedIn, Searchles, and others I don’t follow as closely. I have friends, or the equivalent, on all of those sites. It would be nice to be able to follow all of these friends from one page rather than go to each of these sites. Yes, the Internet makes us lazy.
There are several companies working on this problem. The one I heard about most recently is FriendFeed. Founded a few months ago by four ex-Google employees, it lets you subscribe to your friends’ updates across 35 social networks. Tamar Weinberg wrote about FriendFeed recently for Techipedia. She notes that by looking at someone’s FriendFeed page, you can find out what they’re interested in, their schedules, and how serious they are about social media.
She also points out that FriendFeed is more than just an aggregator. “Beyond learning about your users, FriendFeed allows users to comment on content within the site itself. You can ‘like’ certain discoveries of your friends and even engage in a discussion,” Weinberg explains.
This has a downside though: information overload. “At this time, unless you’re manually filtering out content or unsubscribing from friends whose content may not be relevant to your interests, there’s just a whole lot of information to read,” Weinberg notes. And someone like me would be in quite a quandary. I write about SEO, but my interests range all over the spectrum. There literally isn’t enough time in a day to read about all of them. Perhaps the next frontier in this kind of aggregation involves finding good ways to categorize and prioritize the items to which you have subscribed.
Next: Popularity as a Commodity? >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
