When Your Social Sites Need Networking

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Some folks are content to keep their networks separate for other reasons. As people move to different stages of their lives, they often move to new social networks, rather than delete old acquaintances, says Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher and graduate student fellow at University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication. "The only reason people delete each other from a network is because of a vicious breakup," says Boyd. Old social-networking accounts are often like time capsules, akin to a high school yearbook, she says. In cases like that, it may not make sense to aggregate sites, she says.

Missing the MySpace Experience

About nine months ago Harrison Tang and three friends from Stanford started a social-network aggregator, Spokeo. The site acted like an easy-to-use "really simple syndication," or RSS, reader for new blog entries, YouTube videos, photos, and other social-networking feeds. Yet it didn't go as planned. "A social network is like a community and you can't really integrate communities," says Tang. "They have personalities. People who like MySpace don't like Facebook, and vice versa." In May, Tang and his colleagues shuttered Spokeo.

Indeed, people can have many different roles in their lives, some of which may be conflicting. Someone may be a mother, an employee, and a gambler, and people may not want to connect these roles, says Broadband Mechanics' Canter. However Canter suggests that using personas for each of these roles might solve the problem and that people may choose to aggregate specific roles. "Maybe you will want all the mom and church Web sites to connect together," he says, adding that the ability to have separate personas will eventually be included in his product.

Others say that social-networking aggregators, as they operate today, take people out of the immediate experience of a social-networking site such as MySpace or Facebook, which they may enjoy. While Spokeo was still operating, Rob Lindsey, 30, signed up to test it out. The freelance Web developer from Columbia, S.C., uses MySpace every day to keep up with his 120 friends there, but he also visits Friendster and Facebook a few times a week. Lindsey says 95% of his MySpace friends are actual friends and he uses it to catch up with people he sees in the real world and to plan real-life events. But he found that with Spokeo, he felt pulled out of the experience of the social network and missed the interaction. "You're reading updates and your friends become news rather than being friends," he says.

Next: Built into Browsers

Ultimately, Canter says that when we get to the point where open standards proliferate and customers can control their data and move them around however they want, there won't be a need for separate aggregators. For instance, in the future, Canter says that users might want to create a direct relationship with someone who is on a different network, post content from one platform onto another network, or even create a group across networks. "The aggregation of the profile should be inherent in each system," says Canter who adds that most of the social-networking aggregators on the market today are a temporary fix while the industry catches up. In the future, that integration could even happen in the browser, he says.

Williamson of eMarketer points out that Mozilla is developing a Firefox add-on called The Coop that will add social tools to the Web browser. The browser will let users essentially "subscribe" to a friend and easily keep track of that person's pictures, movies, blog posts, and other new information as it comes along. The browser will show friends' faces; to share a photo or other information with a friend will simply require dragging that item onto the friend's face. Says Williamson, "You don't have to visit a Web page—it's all part of your browser and I think we may ultimately be headed in that direction."

But until the job is done by the Web browser or the networks themselves, many people will likely turn to other tools to manage their crowded social-network lives.

Rachael King is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in San Francisco.