Inventor and tech philosopher Dave Winer Twittered tonight that federation is the hot thing, pointing to a New York Times article about Facebook Connect. And just like that, he touched upon the third rail of our increasingly social web. The big question facing the social web depends on the direction it needs to take. A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has led to the idea of “federation.” On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place — in other words, aggregation. These two diametrically opposed views of how we are going to come to grips with our social web are going to face an intense debate until consumers vote with their clicks.
United Federation of the Social Web
Federation, as explained on Wikipedia, “describes the technologies, standards and use-cases which serve to enable the portability of identity information across otherwise autonomous security domains. The ultimate goal of identity federation is to enable users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, and without the need for completely redundant user administration.”
Facebook Connect, which was announced in May and is being rolled out this week, allows you to use your Facebook login to access Facebook’s partner web sites, then broadcast what you are doing on those sites to everyone on Facebook. It’s like Facebook Beacon — minus the marketing sleaziness. Partners include the Discovery Channel, the (irrelevant) genealogy network Geni, and (hot) video site Hulu.
“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer told The New York Times. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.” Of course, as I pointed out earlier, this is desperately important for the company to figure out how to make money. As a competitive matrix, here are some of other projects Facebook Connect is teeing off against: Google-sponsored (s goog) Friend Connect, Open ID and MySpace’s Data Availability initiative.
HyperAggregate
On the flip side of federation is aggregation. There’s a small army of startups, such as FriendFeed and Ping.fm, that want to act as a dashboard for your entire social-web infrastructure. The latest startup to join the ranks is Power.com, a Rio de Janiero, Brazil-based startup that has until now operated in stealth and has raised $8 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Esther Dyson. The company was started by Steve Vachani.
Vachani’s big idea is that you can come to the Power.com web site, log in and interact with all your social networks, as well as other web services. It is not the first startup of its kind. Several others — MyLifeBrand, Spokeo, Loopster and ProfileLinker — have walked down this road. What Power.com has done is use virality and focus on Orkut to get a big enough user base. Vachani describes his service as “Facebook Connect for everything — an ultimate mashup platform” that connects to data from any service and allows Power.com users to interact with that information.
It works like this: You register all your web services and social networks on Power.com. Once you log on, you are automatically logged on everywhere that matters and you can easily go from Power.com to any one of your social networks with a single click. Your start page on Power.com (a stripped-down cross between Facebook’s start page and Netvibes) will show you all of your friends, messages and content — from all their social networks, soon from instant messengers and email accounts — in one place. All your friends, messages, updates, birthdays and photos from diverse social networks will be aggregated nicely together.
A Power “communicator” will allow you to send information to all your friends across networks with the ease of sending an email. “This is just like Meebo,” Vachani insisted, where they log in to and constantly interact with the service. It doesn’t use any APIs, and all the magic happens using this technology developed by the company. Vachani called it “intelligent proxy.” I have asked for more details to understand how exactly it works.
Power.com claims that all your information is going to be arranged by people, not by discrete web destinations. Soon you will be able to use its dashboard to do everything on the web — or so it boldly hints in the press materials. The company claims it has 5 million registered users in Latin America and India and says it will hit 30 million by 2009. How it is claiming all these numbers and growth is a tad fuzzy.
Theoretically (and only theoretically) the idea of aggregating your web content and activites makes a lot of sense. Back in March 2007, in a column for Business 2.0, I wrote: “This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators….It’s impossible to keep up with dozens of social networks, millions of videos and thousands of blogs. Hyperaggregation is simply a way to do in the new-media world what old media has done for centuries: neatly package information.”
The demo of the service was quite impressive, but there was something about the service that makes me uneasy. Don’t get me wrong — I think they have built an interesting service, but many questions remain before it wins me over.
A Privacy Problem?
First of all, how is this going to turn into a big business? My guess is that our profiles would be used for some kind of marketing. In its terms of service, Power.com says:
You agree that Power may use your image for advertisement purposes. These advertisements will only be displayed to the same user whose image is being used.
Given my distaste for Facebook’s Beacon and other ad-supported efforts, this line makes me pretty queasy. Down in its TOS, Power.com notes that by saying yes to its service agreement, you are authorizing “Power.com to add the URL WEBSITE to my profile, linked to the site My.Power – Power profile of the user.” In other words, they can become your presence on the web, and the company can build a global social directory.
All these issues I would still be able to put aside, but I am not sure I want to aggregate and trust all my private information, including my personal communications (IM messages, emails and what not), to a tiny startup. What assurance is there when it comes to fidelity of my data? I am waiting for Vachani to outline how his company will be able to do that.
Instead, I very much like Loic Le Meur’s concept of “centralized me. “I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third-party service,” he wrote. I couldn’t agree more.
Image courtesy of Luic Le Meur
Om, I agree with almost all of the ideas you discussed. It took the longest time for my friends to get me to use services like Facebook, and aggregating services such as Ping.fm. Lately, FriendFeed has been the buzz of the networks I partake in.
Hyperaggregation is a great solution to all the different social networking services out there, but security and privacy, as you said, are also my primary concerns. This also brings me to another thought: Hyperaggregation, theoretically, would defeat the purpose of ever having to visit the official websites that you signed up for. This would screw with market shares, advertising, level of interaction, and so forth.
What I DON’T want to happen (but probably will anyway) is for a dozen hyperaggregating startups such as Power.com to come along to repeat this whole process again. Then there would have to be a NEW hyperaggreator that aggregates all the existing hyperaggregator (or would they be just “aggregators” at that point?).
Companies are building services atop services without a proven business model. Has anyone taken a step back and realized just how crazy this is?
Hi,
My name is power.com. I’m a solution looking for my problem.
Has anyone seen it?
Thanks,
Power
Power.com will finally be our solution where we can access the whole web. But that too needs lot of improvement. See RWW post on Power.com
http://bit.ly/jUvO
Regards: rizzy
http://twitter.com/rizzy81
Or none of the above? Or at least that none of the above solutions are relevant if you hold that SOCIAL media isn’t entirely relevant to business in that way that other influencing factors are. I sort of see it like football on Sunday–or Saturday if you’re more the college football type.
I realize I’m in the very small minority here, but I will gladly call a time waster a time waster when need be. I love that photo of Luic Le Meur’s notebook. My best ideas are scribbled with sharpie markers, not tweeted on twitter or batted around in emails.
As I’ve said before, social networking is not a business plan. Perhaps it’s the business of entertainment and socializing, but I daresay it doesn’t even fit my definition of networking.
What’s your noise to information ratio?
Well, at least you will be busy no matter what.
Totally with you on this Om. Check out this essay i did earlier this year – http://sites.google.com/a/itsmygraph.com/its-my-graph/.
I do think that federation and aggregation can complement each other. Imagine a “Social Me” with its own API for others to aggregate. That way we would have the edge (Social Me) and the ability to mash up the edge into useful products.
Keith
I’d argue that Connect is as much an aggregation play as it is a federation one. SSO for facebook is also about getting that third party site vitality into Facebook- which fits into aggregation. I’d also consider broadening the definition of ‘federation’ beyond single sign on- to features that take your social data and federate it out to sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Sheryl is right, one of my portfolio companies, http://www.wgt.com/gameclient.aspx, has a higher engagement rate than both Facebook and Myspace in that our users are spending 18 minutes per session and visiting our site 5 times a week. With a microtransaction format we can put $100 million into Facebook’s pockets via rev shares, see inverse commpton scattering. Eyeballs only get street cred when they have little green dollar signs in the iris or Sine Cerere et Libero Friget Venus for you Latin freaks.
Not sure if they will be able to leverage Friend Connect to solely rely of advertising revenue
Not sure if they will be able to leverage Friend Connect to solely rely of advertising revenue
http://tinyurl.com/6c6p5h
Not to ruin the party guys, but most social networks are already struggling to come up with a business model that works, and here comes these other guys trying to built services on top of that?
Is like building floating gas stations for the flying cars that are still in early prototype state…
@phoneboy please check out @shadowlayer’s response. very nearly perfect…. 😉
@ Joker, thanks for the chuckle.
@Heather Kennedy – very valid point and to a large extent I am with you, though I believe smaller focused networks are actually useful at times.
@rizzy, I am not sure I am convinced by Power.com and the RWW post doesn’t help change my mind either.
@Nick, can you elaborate? I think you are making an interesting point but it is not fully shared by you. would love to know more.
@shadowlayer that’s basically what I said, but you had a better metaphor.
I think perhaps it’s precisely the nature of the “smaller focused networks” and who would be using them that is an intriguing idea. Perhaps that is where you would find the profitable business model. I could think of three off the top of my head.
Great piece. Especially the point made about trust and exploiting your data. To many of the current Social Media/Network sites are dependent on that model to succeed and it has become an uncomfortable norm we accept as payment for participation.
We have been struggling with finding the best solution to the issue of trust within our own efforts at chi.mp since we do not depend on exploiting our owners content. We have always believed your data is yours and yours alone to keep, export, manipulate or delete. It has been one of the fundamental pillars of our service offering and what we embrace as a philosophy in our design and development. What we have done to date and will continue to improve on is very much inline with Loic Le Meur’s concept of “centralized me” where we gather all of your services in one place, with blog, profile and contact info on a DOMAIN that you own and control. There are a whole suite of services offered within chi.mp that will allow owners (yes I said owners not users) will be privy to with in the back end of chi.mp that will allow for syndication (push feature), enhanced contact management, true data portability and a centralized hub for communications. Our hope is that this may resolve some of the issues we are all facing and allow for the concept of a federation and aggregation to peacefully coexist and benefit all of us.
I like the concept that power.com represents, have not had a chance to truly test drive the site yet and I am more than impressed with their claimed user base. From all of us at http://chi.mp we wish them well and encourage others to try an resolve the issues at hand that affect all of us.
Actually, I think aggregation and federation are orthogonal. Federation is about authentication and aggregation is about access to my data (i.e. API access).
Expanded thoughts here (http://practicalid.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-it-really-aggregation-vs-federation.html)
I think you have to have federation for aggregation to truly become ubiquitous. The only way that you the user can allow another party like power.com to access your social networks on your behalf today is to give them your username and password. The obvious abuses and violations of TOS agreements that come into play pose enough of a barrier to prevent aggregation services from reaching mainstream acceptance. Without a way to delegate abilities to a service like an aggregation service that doesn’t involve the service impersonating the user, the risk/reward ratio will always get in the way.
why not interoperability between these social networking and instant messaging services? email and SMS did, albeit in different ways. hyperaggregation is just a poor, privacy-deficient hack to achieve interoperability.
Great article. I was asked that often and wrote a quick entry on defining federation versus aggregation found here. http://thesocialnetworker.com/tsn/tsn.nsf/dx/defining-aggregation-versus-lifestreaming.htm
But more importantly was the part about sending your private information to the streams. This is something everyone overlooks but a new site is dedicated to that very issue http://SocialStalking.com
Real interesting dilemma: federate or aggregate? And real interesting post.
Here’s an analysis of what it could be: federate AND aggregate. And target your message directly to the people you want to talk to in the environment you choose.
http://stefanomaggi.blogspot.com
(link was missing in my previous post)
I thought Power.com looked familiar!
It was called Powerscrap, when Orkut was blocked by our proxy! That I think, is how it actually became popular!
It was sleazy then, and it is just a good looking sleaze now!
At least you can see the sleaze. With Facebook, I feel like I bought a Reliance phone, never know what is going to happen! Somehow, Google connect feels a little safer.
The only federated thing I have ever tried, is retweeting, only because it is something I would do anyway, especially on bbc.co.uk
So there you go, I would use an aggregator like Power.com or Netvibes.com, only when it provides a level of access which the normal website doesn’t !
A federation is used, only when it is intuitive enough to make my usual impulse easier!