Yesterday I wrote about the social media application space - the myriad services that are appearing to give users ways to communicate and share content. As I looked over these sites, one thing kept bothering me, and it’s something that I think is a fundamental question for users and developers alike: how does the overall social media ecosystem work?
Let me explain what I mean by example.
For blogs, the most highly developed piece of the social media world, there are very clear ways that content and users interact. Content creators (bloggers) use the tools (blog services and software) to create and distribute content. That content is, ultimately, nothing more than web pages; blog tools are really just specialized content management systems. The social aspect comes in the commenting features and by choices that bloggers make about links to other content.
Content consumers simply view the web sites that bloggers have created, or gather feeds from them using tools such as Google Reader or RSS software like NetNewsWire.
One of the reasons that blogging works so well is that control rests in the hands of the content creators and consumers. Generally speaking, no content consumer has to make a choice to become a user of a blog platform; content creators can use whatever platform they choose to manage their content, and even change platforms with minimal disruption to consumers.
At the other extreme are social network sites, with Facebook being the extreme in an extreme category. Facebook has all kinds of great capabilities and features, but they are only available to Facebook users - on both the creation and consumption side. Moreover, because Facebook manages the networks of users - by providing good tools to keep track of the relationships between people - there’s some severe lock-in.
Most social media applications are, of course, somewhere in the middle. While you need to sign up for a Twitter account in order to really use it to its full potential, someone who has limited interest in it can still very easily keep up with the content of Twitterers who interest them - either by viewing a Twitter page or following a user’s feed.
Another piece of the ecosystem, and one that I think we’ll see more of, is aggregation. If I have three blogs, and I use Twitter and Pownce and Jaiku, and I have a Tumblr blog, how do you keep up with me? How about if I also write lots of reviews on Amazon.com and in the iTunes store? We’re starting to see a category of “lifestreaming” apps that try to bring all of this together, with various degrees of success and elegance. It’s not just a consumption question, though; what do I choose to put on Twitter vs Pownce vs my blog?
In some cases, the decisions are pretty easy; for Twitter vs blogging, content tends to clearly fit in one place versus the other. But what about Tumblr vs Utterz vs your blog?
I would, incidentally, call Google Reader an aggregation tool - and a really good one. It is, however, a tool that falls apart if someone decides (as some have) they need to cross-post content through different social media apps. (Last year Scoble wrote about tools to cross post to everywhere at once and I thought, “Wow, that sounds like a big headache for readers.”)
One of the commenters on that Scoble post put it well:
I’ve been ranting about this for a couple of weeks. The latest is here. ‘ve also been trying the blueswarm.org profile aggregator, which makes some steps toward the goal I’m looking for, except that it goes the wrong way. I want one central profile that I can update, preferably on my own blog website, that automatically feeds to the services I use. Not the other way around.
Precisely! One of the reasons that Facebook has been getting into trouble with users is their insistence that they own that central profile (at least for what you do on Facebook) and that is just the wrong approach; moreover, it’s one that I think will stifle the growth of social media.
And it’s not just Facebook; Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Flickr and all the rest have their own tools to connect with people. And so they are all duplicating an essential function. They also vary in how deep they go into one area: Google Reader is an end-point for content consumption, and has some network features (sharing feeds with friends, for example); Flickr can be an endpoint for consumption, or it can be a content source for Google Reader. And so on, in endless variations.)
And let’s face it, most users are simply not going to invest the time into managing their social connections on many different sites. I blog, Twitter, and use Facebook and LinkedIn, and that’s as much as I care to deal with. It is, in fact, too much and I would love to ditch one of those two social network sites altogether, but I get value out of both. But the overhead is really too much.
I don’t think anybody developing these apps is going to want to let go of that piece, though, because it’s the high value piece. Content creation and management is cool but easily duplicated. So are tools to aggregate and consume content. Keeping track of the people is the piece where the value comes in. Whoever is doing that has staying power. It’s the operating system of social media.
So consider this simple social media ecosystem:
And consider how a few social media applications fit into it:
And consider the question: who will do what? And who will provide the OS? And how will that impact adoption and future use of social media?