Social Media is about Aggregation – Not Publishing/Networks

I’ve been using FriendFeed for several months now. As a matter of fact, with the addition of real-time FriendFeed is now my primary Social Media interface. Why? Because the critical attribute which makes Social Media useful (yep, I’m banging on the adding value drum again) is aggregation, not publishing or networks. Publishing and networks are required – but they quickly become commoditized. An example – Twitter gets popular and up pops Laconica, Yammer, OpenMicroBlogging, identi.ca, …

Social Networks are no different. How many social networks do you have to check every day to keep up? What are the odds that all of your friends (or co-workers) are on the same network?

Social Bookmarking – no different. Friends across multiple networks.

The result is that you – in order to actually use Social Media in a useful way (information discovery) – have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop to attempt to discover anything.

That is why aggregation is so powerful – and why I was never all that impressed with Twitter’s Track feature (which caused so much angst when turned off). Track was only interesting if you assume all the relevant information was/is on Twitter. In other words – the network drives value, not the information – and that completely misses the point.

FriendFeed gets it. The value is in the information – and providing aggregation of that information and useful tools to locate, consume and re-share that information is the key to providing value. With the introduction of Real-Time FriendFeed completely changes the real-time information discovery game.

FriendFeed allows a user to aggregate all the places they view, track, share, and create information. When you follow a person you follow all of their information – regardless of what network it is generated on. That – to me – is the point of a “follow” – I want to know what you find interesting, because if you find it interesting I might too. I really don’t care how you share the information… and I certainly don’t want to follow you around the inter-webs joining every cool new network to get access to the information you view, track, share, and create. When you join a new service (a.k.a., network) you add it to FriendFeed and viola! I can see what you share there as well…

The introduction of real-time (while admittedly imperfect) is a sea change for real-time information discovery. It transforms it from a network (service) based activity (e.g., I can see what happens on Facebook in real-time in Facebook – I can see what happens in Twitter real-time in Twitter – etc) to person based activity – I see, in real-time – what you share, without the limitations of network/service.

The only thing missing from FriendFeed today is aggregation based on topic. That is, the ability to specify a group (e.g., everyone, my friends, a room, etc) and a topic search (e.g., debate, google, pretty cat pictures, etc) and see only information which satisfies both criteria.

At the end of the day – the aggregation of information a person shares, and the ability of others to “follow” that information stream is Social Media. The social graph is interesting, but it doesn’t add value to people’s lives in any meaningful way (granted it creates a highly valuable advertising platform). Efficient sharing of information and information discovery does. Aggregation is the secret sauce.