A discussion about the software industry and their coders

Managing scattered online Social Life on multiple Social Networking sites, I sense, will become a Killer App Category 2008. There are several startups now in the "Social Network Aggregation" space and this App Category should diversify and catch momentum in 2008. Some startups are focusing on identity consolidation, others on messaging consolidation and on tracking friends.  Some like Profilefly offer consolidation of multiple things like Profiles, Contacts and Bookmarks.

Note that I am not talking about Open Social initiative by Google which focuses on providing "A platform for building applications that can be run on multiple social networking sites at the same time...Doesn’t require developers to learn (many) new tricks." Nor am I talking about OpenID which will esentially help users have a single login-password mechanism. (more in another post)

 (image from personalbrandingblog)

The need for users to be a member of not just one but multiple social networks can be understood through Barry Wellman's concept (pdf) of "networked individualism". PEW Internet report "The Strenght of Internet Ties" (pdf) explains networked individualism well:

Rather than relying on a single community for social capital, individuals often must actively seek out a variety of appropriate people and resources for different situations.

In simple words you might be an amateur photographer sharing tips and getting advice about wide angle lenses on Flickr but for your job related networkin/mobility you would depend on LinkedIn. If some of your good friends from high school are on MySpace while the grad school folks went to Facebook you now have 4 Social Networks to Manage! Thats why my predication that tools for helping users manage their memberships across Social Networks will emerge as a Killer App category. This means more funding dollars, acquisitions and even more creative startups.

Recent research data from Compete confirms that people are tending to have multiple Social Network Memberships. E.g. 20% of MySpace members are also Facebook Members.

Compete further gives these interesting data points

• 64% of Facebook members also belong to MySpace. (MySpace has nearly 3x the unique visitors of Facebook and a few years head start.)
• Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster all share more than 49% of their members with MySpace
• LinkedIn shares 42% of its members with Facebook and 32% with MySpace

Also of Interest / Read More: Why Online Ad Models threaten Microsoft?  |  Are Social Networking Sites Next Gen of Yahoo! Like Portals?   |   Google's Product Strategy Demystified    |   3 Types of Platforms explained by Marc Andreessen   |   Are we nearing Dot Com Bust 2.0?