I want my blog to be the aggregator

by Mathew on March 30, 2008 · Comments

Loic LeMeur of Seesmic has a blog post that echoes something I’ve been saying for awhile: having cool services like FriendFeed or Twitter or Flickr or even Facebook is great, and they all serve a specific purpose and have a certain value — but it’s hard to keep track of what is where, and which conversations are going on with whom. A number of people (including me) wrote about this idea of fragmentation with respect to FriendFeed not long ago, but it applies to lots of other services as well.

That’s why I agree with Loic — and with Mike — that the best solution of all is to have a single portal to everything that matters about you, whether it’s your photos (Flickr) or your work history (LinkedIn) or your chats with friends (Twitter). For some people (like me) that portal is always going to be the blog, because that’s where we live most of the time and create most of our content. For others, it might be a Netvibes page or an iGoogle page with widgets for various services, or even their Facebook page — although Facebook isn’t customizable and adaptable enough, I don’t think.

I don’t think FriendFeed.com can be that portal, but it could be a component of that portal. I’m always looking for services that provide widgets and plugins that allow what they offer to be embedded somewhere else, which is why I like Google’s GTalk chat widget. If there was a Twitter widget that offered the same kind of functionality as Twhirl, I would definitely embed it here. And I’m hoping there will be a FriendFeed one as well soon, since Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor seem to be moving at hyperspeed when it comes to new features. But it has to be a two-way widget, with data flowing in both directions.

I’m hoping that the Data Portability efforts that are going on, and Chris “Factory Joe” Messina’s DiSo project, can help make that kind of personal, customizable, widgetized portal a reality.

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Viewing 4 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Yes! I want a customizable widgetizable portal with my FriendFeed stuff.
    • ^
    • v
    Hi, we're actually building a content and identity hub that sits on your domain called chi.mp. You can follow the conversation at www.ownyouridentity.com
    • ^
    • v
    Hey Mathew
    thats pretty much what i do at davidusher.com. Without having that central hub that aggregates everything for me (gotta love RSS) i would never be able to keep track of it all. Its a blog based site that is a social network hub that links my facebook, flicker, twitter, youtube, myspace, ilike etc. Controlling your own URL is key, im on all the social networks but trusting my online life to a walled garden seems foolish to me.
    • ^
    • v
    I agree with your frustration - I think it is an intergration problem which is an interesting issue found in many disciplines particularly social and technological.

    I think one of the main problems is that integration requires common protocol and standards adoption which is not a priority for many service providers, nor is it very easy to build standards for cutting edge technology because that which is cool is innovative and generally requires some departure from protocol.

    From my experience as a programmer most of my job seems to be an intergration one, and I hate to say it but I dont see this central aggregator becoming a reality. The aggregator would need to behave like glue, not only in bringing all the services together, but as you say allowing read and write functionality via its protocols, on top of this it would need a way of piping / wiring together the services (e.g. if you add a friend in one place you would want to add it the other), you would also need a configuration console of some kind to be able to set security levels so that thigns like you professional network, could if you chose be shielded from thos Friday night photos or whatever... It sounds like a great idea for an open source project and I can see some people trying the widget approach to do this, but I still dont think it is tighlty integrated enough. Some of the open social networking standardisation will help but again, to stay up with the edge of innovation there will still need to be some very busy integrators. A 'glue' platform would need to be very flexible and configurable and need to be able to be cross platofrm etc. Does anyone know any people building apps like this glue?

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