3 ms·

Very valid points - but I suspect the main barrier to this kind of thing is that every single "social" site out there wants to be the aggregator and sees others

by brazzy 16y ago

Very valid points - but I suspect the main barrier to this kind of thing is that every single "social" site out there wants to be the aggregator and sees others only as potential input for its own service. Smart aggregation would require some degree of collaboration and standards, and anyone supporting it risks making their own service a subordinate source. Even though this kind of thing would be extremely useful to users, companies will only embrace it if the added value helps driving users to their own service more than to others.

petervandijck 16y ago
In other words: if you're the current market leader (FB), then there's no reason to support other social graphs.
- blasdel 16y ago
  How would that even work in practice? What's the use case that's not already possible via http://graph.facebook.com http://graph.facebook.com (besides hoovering up emails). Besides, if they did somehow integrate further you'd all be crowing about how Facebook was doing an embrace / extend / extinguish maneuver.
j_baker 16y ago
I don't think that social media is a zero-sum game. I mean, it doesn't really matter how many pageviews your competitors are getting as long as it gets you more. The point of business is to build businesses, not to destroy other peoples'. If we were selling cars, then preventing competitors from selling cars would likely mean that you sell more cars. However, if I view an article on reddit then I'm not really taking anything away from digg (except probably a view of that exact article).
- brazzy 16y ago
  It most certainly is a zero-sum game to a considerable degree because the time available to spend on social media by any one person is limited. How many people really use both digg and reddit intensively?
rorymarinich 16y ago
Yes, and even this is a more complicated problem than simply stating it would make it seem. Imagine a solution that was open and allowed anybody to utilize its social graph. In theory this would allow other sites to build off the original and feed it back, maintaining equilibrium between every service. But in practice, this only holds until somebody decides to make a proprietary graph, because then users have nothing to gain by using any service other than the proprietary top level with the extra functionality. And why would we do something like that other than greed? Well, perhaps we want to implement some unique system that's not streamlined or practical, but which we need for a particular plan we have. So we create a system that contains that extra, proprietary data, which is proprietary because making it open would simply make every other service messy. Or perhaps it's that what we want to do would take too long to implement in an open solution, and we'd rather be advanced than be consistent. But the more we build on, the harder and harder it is to move back to that original openness. Similar to an environment like Flash, for instance, which lets developers implement functionality that's vastly beyond HTML (or, was vastly beyond, and still to some degree is), but which then ruins engines that rely on HTML's open format to work. Either you develop to be open, and sacrifice potential features, or you use something proprietary and lose that connection, and further place yourself in the hands of a third-party developer. There isn't a single optimal solution, unless you consider using multiple platforms an optimal solution. (Which I do. I don't feel frustrated at using four sites to monitor my various friends/feeds/updates. I just be careful to delineate all four so that each item appears in the right place, and so that my own updates get pushed to the right places.

by brazzy 16y ago

petervandijck 16y ago

In other words: if you're the current market leader (FB), then there's no reason to support other social graphs.

blasdel 16y ago
How would that even work in practice? What's the use case that's not already possible via http://graph.facebook.com http://graph.facebook.com (besides hoovering up emails). Besides, if they did somehow integrate further you'd all be crowing about how Facebook was doing an embrace / extend / extinguish maneuver.

j_baker 16y ago

I don't think that social media is a zero-sum game. I mean, it doesn't really matter how many pageviews your competitors are getting as long as it gets you more. The point of business is to build businesses, not to destroy other peoples'. If we were selling cars, then preventing competitors from selling cars would likely mean that you sell more cars. However, if I view an article on reddit then I'm not really taking anything away from digg (except probably a view of that exact article).

brazzy 16y ago
It most certainly is a zero-sum game to a considerable degree because the time available to spend on social media by any one person is limited. How many people really use both digg and reddit intensively?

rorymarinich 16y ago

Yes, and even this is a more complicated problem than simply stating it would make it seem. Imagine a solution that was open and allowed anybody to utilize its social graph. In theory this would allow other sites to build off the original and feed it back, maintaining equilibrium between every service. But in practice, this only holds until somebody decides to make a proprietary graph, because then users have nothing to gain by using any service other than the proprietary top level with the extra functionality. And why would we do something like that other than greed? Well, perhaps we want to implement some unique system that's not streamlined or practical, but which we need for a particular plan we have. So we create a system that contains that extra, proprietary data, which is proprietary because making it open would simply make every other service messy. Or perhaps it's that what we want to do would take too long to implement in an open solution, and we'd rather be advanced than be consistent. But the more we build on, the harder and harder it is to move back to that original openness. Similar to an environment like Flash, for instance, which lets developers implement functionality that's vastly beyond HTML (or, was vastly beyond, and still to some degree is), but which then ruins engines that rely on HTML's open format to work. Either you develop to be open, and sacrifice potential features, or you use something proprietary and lose that connection, and further place yourself in the hands of a third-party developer. There isn't a single optimal solution, unless you consider using multiple platforms an optimal solution. (Which I do. I don't feel frustrated at using four sites to monitor my various friends/feeds/updates. I just be careful to delineate all four so that each item appears in the right place, and so that my own updates get pushed to the right places.