The Rise of the Aggregate in Social Media Applications

How many Social Media services are there? How many do you use? Our research shows over 300 blogging platforms, over 80 calendar services, 20 microblogging platforms, 200+ news feed services, numerous Web conferencing solutions, multiple Instant Messaging services, 300 plus variations on RSS feeders, over 20 Web-based sales automation and CRM solutions, 1000+ CMS solutions to manage your content, 14 teleconference solutions. In other words, we’re overflowing with Web 2.0 and Social Media applications.

To engage in Social Media as a consumer, our research shows the average consumer has 4 Social Media services they use; Social Network (i.e. Facebook), Microblog (i.e. Twitter), Blog (i.e. Blogger), email (according to eMarketer most active Web users have 3 email accounts) and a preferred photo sharing site. The issue then becomes “which” of these services do they use? Some behavioural research we did showed that the average user will sign up for 4 additional Social Media services (such as calendaring, video sharing etc.) over the run of a six month period, but there is only a 20% chance that these additional services will be used more than 2 times after sign-up. You can infer a lot in user behaviour patterns and churn rate issues for the providers of these services.

Now we increasingly see the rise of “aggregation” services in Social Media applications (Friendfeed being an example.) These are services that pull information from multiple sources or broadcast to multiple services creating Pull Aggregators and Broadcast Aggregators. The failure of most of these however is that they limit “what” they pull or push. For example, Ping.fm pushes (to a fair number of services, but not all) and others only aggregate RSS feeds. Granted that the major issue is each provider allowing these connections. Something OpenID is aiming to solve, and looks to be doing so. The best Services Aggregator (pull and push) we’ve seen so far is Digsby. We wouldn’t call it a “professional” type of service yet, but for people active in Social Media and just “conversing” it is a great tool. It is still only for Windows, though we think it will work best when it resides purely in the browser and can have total platform and device independence.

What we are seeing though, is a definite need for such aggregators, perhaps better called Information Arbiters than aggregators. As SmartPhone adoption grows there will be more apps developed, and thus the need for arbitration will need to tie with aggregation the more society learns to leverage Social Media.