The social web spawns a new network every 5 seconds. Roughly.
And every 3 seconds, a new app rears its shiny little head to offer centralization, aggregation, and status- or file-pushing for the dozen or more profiles and sites maintained by the average user.
For profile whores (guilty!), these sites tempt with promises of the ultimate tool for managing your online presence in a cohesive way, assembling the fragments of data into a unified front for your personal brand. Forgoing any commentary on the narcissism and navel-gazing of a fruitless generation, I’ll limit my overarching criticism of these services to two main points: They’re not sticky, and they cause redundancies.
With regard to my first point, it’s very common (for me, at least) to sign up for a still-in-beta site after being digitally flirted with across a few channels, only to discover that the range, scope, usability, and urgency (what I’d call the addictiveness factors) of the offering weren’t compelling enough to prompt return visits.
As for the second point, we’ll get into more specific detail in the reviews below; let it suffice to say that I’m connected to most friends across several networks. If you or I use a status-pushing or file-pushing service, I’m getting the same message from you on Twitter, Facebook, and likely the aggregating site, as well. And no one wants to see your TwitPics of breakfast three times in a row.
“But that’s not how it works!” you may cry. “Site X eliminates your need to go to those other sites!”
Welcome to the real world. Like most users, I still occasionally have to visit Facebook; and I even (gasp!) still use the Twitter.com web interface. So until your Super Magical Candy Mountain stream-aggregating site gains critical mass and actually fulfills its brand promise of being “the only social site you’ll ever need to use,” redundancies are an unfortunate fact, both redundancies in content and redundancies in services offered. In other words, don’t pitch your site as “the ultimate contact address book.” I’ve already got one, and it’s already got the critical mass to live up to that promise (here’s looking at you, Zuckerberg). Likewise, building an independent microblogging function into your service is pointless on top of pointless; God already made Twitter once.
Now, let’s get on with the roast!
FriendFeed: Like a Mao Suit for Your Social Streams.
FriendFeed
The granddaddy of aggregators, FriendFeed is more commonly known by its street name, “Scoble’s lapdog.”
The ‘Feed pushes updates to Twitter, rounds up links you like, streams activity in any feed reader, and even generates a nice little widget for your blog or site. From FriendFeed, you can post text, photos, or links; you can also grab other RSS feeds and insert them in your stream.
The three problems I’ve had with FriendFeed since the Scoble pimping began are that it’s butt ugly (no objections, right?) and that it totally typifies the two abovementioned overarching objections.
Customization: Gives new meaning to the term “absolute zero.”
Content Posting: You can comment on and “like” posted updates or links, and you can share links through a bookmarking function. You can also post text and photos. Rather thorough!
Mobile Functionality: Email, MMS, and an “iPhone-optimized interface.”
Roasted: Well done, but could’ve been done much better. “Mmmm” for “missed opportunity.”
Chi.mp: Hollered Beta.
Chi.mp
Chi.mp gives the best vanity URLs of any social site. Username.mp. So simple. So easy to remember. And the user interface stands out as one of the prettiest, most fleshed-out in its class. Still, customization is minimal; I can’t even suss out how to change my avatar. I’m guessing it’ll change when I update my Facebook avatar, but shouldn’t that be a bit more intuitive?
Also, the idea of “personas” has been employed to some effect here. Mom and your boss and your Friday night crew all get to see different sides of you, on the web as in life. But shouldn’t we have the ability to decide how many personas we get to have? And how do we know which users see which content? O’Dell is confused on this point; it seems like a great and necessary but complicated concept.
I can’t offer praise for Chi.mp’s “mini blog” or photo upload functions; on my profile, they push updates to Facebook and Twitter, but not to WordPress or Flickr, which would be the more intuitive choices and would eliminate the need for visiting other sites to repost redundant content. I also question the usefulness of the email forwarding; I can set up whatever@jolieodell.mp and have those messages forwarded to my Gmail account, but… Why?
And why in god’s sweet name do I have to fill out a profile for personal and professional information when the site’s already syncing with my Facebook and should be able to do the same with my LinkedIn? After bitching on said point on Twitter, Anthony from Chi.mp kindly “hollered beta,” admitting there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Customization: I can pick one of a few backgrounds. Or even a solid color.
Content posting: Mini-blogs and photos which update to Facebook and Twitter.
Mobile Functionality: Uuuuh…
Roasted: Rare, but keep cooking. Put that shrimp back on the barbie, or whatever it is they say in New Zealand.
Retaggr: Thanks for the Widget.
Retaggr
Retaggr is a pure-as-the-driven-snow aggregator. Your custom URL is your social web “business card,” so to speak. Your Retaggr card can be emailed, tweeted, pinged, etc.; and the Retaggr widget makes a handy all-in-one stream feeder for your blog or website. Heck, even I use it. It also gives you a nifty ClicktoAdd.Me URL that allows users to quickly peruse their Internet-stalking options and (in some cases) instantly connect to you across those social sites.
But the widget’s rather ugly, the profile page is useless, and the functionality is limited. As a result, the odds you’ll forget about the site shortly after you sign up are pretty high.
Customization: Users can choose themes, backgrounds, colors, and a vanity URL.
Content Posting: None; this baby’s a pure aggregator. You can tag images, but only on Retaggr-enabled sites.
Mobile Functionality: See above; so, none.
Roasted: Throw it on the coals and douse it in lighter fluid. It’s done.
Pixelpipe: Actually Doesn’t Suck!
Pixelpipe
For some cosmic/hormonal reason, I hated the Pixelpipe live demo I saw last week at SF New Tech. After TechCrunch’s review, I spewed some bile into the comments section about how there are already too many value-free aggregating/status pushing services and went on with my life. I now must nibble lightly on my words; Pixelpipe doesn’t suck.
The suprisingly simple three-click process for adding most “pipes” is among the fastest processes I’ve seen yet. Unfortunately, it’s giving me unidentifiable technical problems with pushing status updates to Facebook (mystery error message FTW?), and double-posting to TwitPic/Twitter (see the all-important redundancy note at the beginning of this gargantuan post). And I still can’t get the background image upload form to work.
Customization: Allows for custom or colored background/headline on a hosted page; but so far, I haven’t been able to make that work.
Content Posting: Uploads status updates/microblogs, photos, videos, audio, and other files; then pushes the content to any relevant social sites you’ve linked.
Mobile Functionality: Email, MMS, an iPhone app, an Android app, etc. Seems poised for mobile greatness.
Roasted: Medium rare. Stick a fork in it and send feedback to @brettb.
Cliqset: Back to the Drawing Board, Kids.
Cliqset
This is literally the profile I forgot I had. I tried to sign up for a beta invite, only to discover my username had already been taken… by me.
Even the Cliqset blog seems confused on what the hell Cliqset is supposed to do. The product is unfocused and, currently, it doesn’t… do… anything. Wait, is that even possible?
Oh, right, it’s the social web. Ninety percent of these “revolutionary platforms” don’t do anything.
Cliqset, however, is particularly offensive, spurning existing aggregation services and data portability while offering the most grandiose and amibitious plan to offer users a single social identity on the web.
Unfortunately, Cliqset neither gathers data from my other social sites, nor does it push my updates to my existing profiles. Guess what it is? Just another microblogging service, but with less functionality and no mass of users.
Customization: None.
Content posting: Status updates that go nowhere outside Cliqset.com
Mobile Functionality: Kill me now.
Roasted: You can’t roast a turd.
Posterous: Emailing Like It’s 1996.
Posterous
The setup process (sending an email to post@posterous.com) was delightfully novel, leading me to a super simple two-button service-adding process for linking my Posterous account to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, the ol’ blog, and… and…
Oh, wait. I guess that’s it.
No support for Last.fm, YouTube, Vimeo, Plurk (hah, ok, that was a joke), or anything like that. Users can send email to help@posterous.com to suggest more services.
Posterous offers an interesting bookmarking function for quick posting and commenting, and users can control what gets posted where by specifying an email address (Twitter-only posts go to twitter@posterous.com; but what if you want an update to go only to Twitter AND Facebook without having to send two emails?).
Overall, the functions are all tied to email and limited accordingly (good luck uploading that 3 minute video clip, dude!), and the “meh” factor is high.
Customization: I get to choose my avatar.
Content Posting: Borderline CMS-y. Can post videos, audio, photos, and text to a blog.
Mobile Functionality: If you can email from your phone, you’re golden.
Roasted: Medium. The blog part is tasty, but the constant repetition and redundancy can be a bit tough and chewy.
And that’s the lot!
Who did I miss? Did I leave out your startup? Do you have a better idea?
Leave a comment here, or email me at jolie.odell@gmail.com.
11 Comments
April 12, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Big thanks for including us in your review and helpful criticism, always great to hear that we “don’t suck”
!
As for the Facebook error you’d mentioned it’s most likely happening because you didn’t provide us with a separate permission for status updates when you set up the Facebook Pipe. This is a Facebook requirement and you can set the permission for status updates (and video uploads) under ‘My Pipes’ . We really need to make that requirement more obvious.
For customizing your pi.pe landing page if you’re getting an error when saving it may be that you have a saved password that’s being auto populated in the form, if the errors says your “password doesn’t match” then just remove the password value.
Thanks again, feel free to get back to us with any questions or feedback.
April 12, 2009 at 11:32 pm
@Pixelpipe By “you don’t suck,” I mean you’ve offered the best service of the lot.
Will follow up with you regarding the pointers above – and thanks for stopping by and leaving your feedback for me! Sorry again for being such a crankypants after the SF New Tech demo.
April 12, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Ugh. Thanks for trawling the promises of ‘agrevators’ for us. All I want is simplicity, simplicity, simplicity – even at the cost of functionality… okay well maybe not, but I’d rather something that does X and I can understand that it does X in two minutes than something that does A-Z but crashes after you try CZB with a L2 special plugin. Why do we see so much of the latter?
BTW: I hope you aren’t leading me up the garden path on Noovo in this case. We shall see
April 12, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Oh crap: hate seeing terrible spelling mistakes in something I’ve just submitted for moderation. *aggravators
April 12, 2009 at 11:46 pm
My Noovo review is coming shortly.
The reason I’m pimping it (medium style) is because it incorporates all the functionality of the aggregators with a gorgeous UI and a crap-ton of rich features. I highly recommend scratching the surface and submitting some content. Early adoption and testing might prove to be a very good idea on this one.
April 13, 2009 at 12:15 am
Hi Jolie,
Thanks for the mention (any press is better than none at all) but Cliqset really doesn’t belong in this category. Cliqset is platform for creating social applications that share a common backend. We’re trying to create a new type of social eco-system where users have a single set of foundational social characteristics that applications and consume and reshape on the users behalf.
Aggregation and status push really isn’t what we’re about at all although we will likely support them to some degree in the future.
April 13, 2009 at 12:33 am
@Darren “We’re trying to create a new type of social eco-system where users have a single set of foundational social characteristics that applications and consume and reshape on the users behalf.”
I don’t want to sound ignorant, but the overwhelming majority of users don’t know what that means and don’t understand how (or why) they’re supposed to use Cliqset. Can you tell me how you envision Cliqset adding value to the already cluttered social space? As the kids at Pixelpipes can attest, I love being proven wrong, especially when a good startup product comes out on top! =)
April 13, 2009 at 1:30 am
Sure, and you’re right, we’ve done a terrible job a communication. Something we’re going to address shortly.
So today everyone’s talking about the ‘open web’ and ‘data portability’. At 10000ft the problem trying to be solved is how do we do a better job of moving social information around from website to website, application to application, and improve the user experience in the process.
Today the solution is good but not great. It involves a constant dance of importing and exporting friends lists, profile data, contacts, activities, etc, etc and then having each application work hard to keep it all in sync. It’s complicated and IMO inefficient.
What if there was a better way? What if there was a single place all of this information could live and social apps (websites, mobile, desktop, etc) could simply share, reuse and reshape it. That is Cliqset. We’ve created a platform of social services (http://developer.cliqset.com/main/docs) any and all applications and read and write to on behalf of the user. They can find and establish friendships, retrieve and manipulate your profile, create and read yours and your friends activity streams, send and receive messages.
If you’re familiar with FireEagle, you can think of Cliqset as FireEagle for social information.
So why is this a good idea? How does it change things? Here are a few quick items:
1) Cliqset will eliminate the need for creating countless copies of social data. You have one copy of your friends, activities, messages, profile, etc that you maintain and share with other Cliqset-enabled apps.
2) You can interact with your friends across social networks and applications. All Cliqset-enabled applications share the underlying messaging, activities, relationships systems so your friends are always accessible and when you find a new friend on one site they’ll with you everywhere else you go.
3) New social app startups no longer need to get you and all your friends to become valuable and ’sticky’. By building on Cliqset, they’re plugging their application into all of the social data that’s created by all other Cliqset-enabled apps. They’re all part of the same social mesh, each building off the other.
4) Large monolithic social networks become irrelevant. The social web becomes a mesh of niche services that are focused on smaller interest groups while maintaining connectivity to everyone else.
What’s standing in our way?
Well our focus right now is 1) refining our message and resolving confusion around our service, 2) building a strong development community. These two issues need to be addressed before we can start down the path of building the next generation of the social web.
Please shoot me an email if you’d like to discuss this a little more. I’d be happy to talk to you.
April 13, 2009 at 7:58 am
Thank you for giving such a thought-out and detailed response.
I concur that current methods of managing individual, fragmented social profiles are ridiculously inefficient. And you’re right: We need to find a better solution.
However, I do tend to see data portability and open social as steps in the right direction; I don’t (from my own intuition, mind you) believe that any one site, app, or individual development will have the technical capabilities or the critical mass of users to coordinate even the majority of existing social data online.
The problem is huge, and the solutions are multilateral and cooperative. To quote a marginally more gifted person, the solutions lie in protocols rather than products.
That, at least, is my belief. My hope is that the usefulness and efficiency of the social web will continue to increase as exponentially as it has since the days of Usenet.
Hi fives all around the table, my friend. I look forward to seeing what Cliqset puts forward next. And yeah, I apologize for calling it a turd; the tabloid journalist in me got a bit carried away. From your thoughtful engagement, I am relieved to assume there are no hard feelings on that score.
=)
April 13, 2009 at 11:20 am
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April 20, 2009 at 10:11 pm
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