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Uncategorized: Trip reports: Uuugh…
Published on 10/03/07
by Zac Echola
I’ve learned something this week. Profile aggregators are a pain. All of them.
I went through these profile aggregators:
claimID
Explode
FindMeOn
Iceflake
Lijit
Metathings
Mugshot
Naymz
onXiam
Opinity
Ozmozr
Profilactic
ProfileFly
ProfileLinker
At best they’re simple bookmark lists sitting on a Web page. At worst, they’re needless headaches. Most of them are useless, many of them don’t work as advertised and half of them are bad copies of another aggregator on the list.
It’s easier to share videos with youtube. It’s easier to stay in touch with colleagues and classmates with linkedIn and Facebook respectively. It’s easier to share photos with the world on flickr. Great! I love applications that do those things and do them well. But copy cats are starting to annoy the crap out of me.
I’m seriously wondering if there’s even a reason to aggregate the content I create into one place. The great thing about Web 2.0 isn’t that it’s all about me. It’s that it’s all about my content. With all these fancy social applications, I can target my content to people I want to target it at.
My professional network on LinkedIn doesn’t need to see photos of me hanging out at a bar with friends. My family, whom I share photos with on flickr, doesn’t need to read my wall at Facebook. Hell, they don’t even need to know I have a facebook to begin with.
Separation is, in fact, a good thing.
The end. Or is it?
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Tags: applications, trip report
Comments on Trip reports: Uuugh…
2 Responses
smorty71
12/03/07
So what was so painful about them? You give no details as to what you didn’t like about any given service. Or is it that you find little value in aggregation? If that’s the case, then none of these sites would ever work for you.
Zac Echola
12/03/07
Yeah, I started to go through all of the different aggregation sites last week (there are a few posts here about a few different sites), before I realized that I can’t see much value in them to begin with. Maybe I didn’t make that clear enough in this post.
The problem with aggregators is that I don’t necessarily want content I’d show my friends next to content specifically catered to my colleagues.
I don’t act the same way I act at work as I act at the bar, for this very same reason.
That isn’t to say that there isn’t any value in aggregating content on different sites specifically created for friends, or specifically created for grandmas, but that sort of editing dilutes the purpose of aggregating my online identity, I think.