Marc Canter’s much anticipated PeopleAggregator is starting to roll out, password protection is scheduled to be removed Wednesday around noon Pacific time. PeopleAggregator is the product of 3 years of self funded work by Canter to bridge the gap between all the online social networking services available and move the industry towards a standards-based place of collaboration. I took a look inside the system today and talked to Canter on the phone. I wasn’t convinced that this was important before today - but now I am.
Canter was the founder of a company called MacroMind in the 1980’s. MacroMind became Macromedia and Canter says he’s paying penance today for the role he played in locking users into Macromedia Flash. PeopleAggregator is all about using open standards to prevent lock-in in one of the most important sectors of the new web - online social networking.
Here’s how it works. PeopleAggregator.net will be a fully functioning online social network in and of itself, but it will share information with other services through common identity standards for our profiles and through APIs (application programming interfaces) for our writing, multimedia and contacts.
Perhaps most important, PeopleAggregator will also provide new social networks with hosted software and later next month will offer downloads of the software for organizations who prefer to host it themselves. Licenses will be free for nonprofits and will cost commercial ventures a one-time sum after they successfully monetize the system.
What this means is that it will be easy to come and go from new social networks, instead of being locked in to one just because you’ve put the time and energy into using your account there. Instead of being at the mercy of one centralized database and service, if Canter’s vision succeeds then countless social networks will proliferate with unique styles and function but with interoperability.
You can currently log in to PeopleAggregator with a LiveJournal or Flickr ID and cross post automatically to LiveJournal, Xanga and any other system that uses the Blogger, Atom or Metaweblogs APIs. Microsoft recently announced the renaming of its new open identity standard, CardSpace, and that will be one of many identity standards supported by PeopleAggregator. Canter expects AOL, Yahoo and Beebo to get on board soon - MySpace will be the hard one, he says.
Canter says he’s got big plans for RSS parsing by item type, with access control for friends, etc. The site already has a nice UI for structured blogging, something I never thought I’d be interested in. The use of a graphic interface, linked to forms that tag new content as a blog post, an event listing, a product review, etc. is so easy in PeopleAggregator that I can imagine myself and others using it happily.
I enjoyed testing PeopleAggregator out, and it solid enough with a few bugs, but what’s most exciting is that any problems I have with its interface, culture or rules are no big deal - I can just take my identity, blog posts and pictures over to another social network that supports open standards and that I like better. That’s power for users.
I talk to people creating new social networks regularly. I always ask them if they are supporting open identity standards. None of the other startups I talk to are. Here’s a way to do that and thus win loyal users through trust instead of lock-in.
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The idea seems solid and well thought out, but getting people to leave the safety of their current social networks will be the challenge.
Unfortunately the vast majority of people who already use MySpace or Facebook don’t care about open standards, RSS, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, FOAF or any other “Web 2.0″ buzzword. Flock rebranded their entire company so they weren’t only attracting “Web 2.0″ netizens, which was a solid idea considering the people who actually care about this geekery make up the tiniest of fractions of the population.
Why do people consistently start new companies with only the tech-savvy people as an audience? It might work for niche companies, but social networks can’t grow or become popular unless they reach out to the 99.995% of the world’s population who don’t read Techcrunch and don’t care or know about “Web 2.0.”
If this site enables the sharing of contacts between existing social networks, it could be huge…
In answer to #2: there enough geeks around (and there are more every day) that small sites, if their overheads are low enough, can actually survive with this small audience!
Mike, I think that cell phone number portability was well received amongst popular audiences. I also think that stroes about employment embarrassment re social networking trails as well as identity theft fears all contribute to a growing awareness of the question “who owns/controls my data?”
On buzzwords, i think that most people who use PeopleAggregator itself will be geeks and folks spawning new social networks that don’t use the words but have the fundamentals down. Open standards may not be a prime selling point for the users of those spawned networks, but it will make their other features all the more compelling when they don’t exist in a context of lock-in. It’s just good practice, isn’t it?
Hmm, making my friends type “PeopleAggregator” or “MySpace”…. which is harder…
What’s ironic is that I even misspelled “aggregator” just now.
I agree with Mike that people need to stay focused on what the larger part of the market needs. When I hear things like “big plans for RSS parsing by item type”, it scares the heck out of me because that kind of thing is a red flag for execution problems. The overall idea I like and I think there’s a need for it, but because of the fact that you will have to gain some widespread adoption and pull people away from their social network comfort zones the execution has to be flawless. With all the new “identity consolidation” ideas coming out, there isn’t any room to stumble the wrong direction towards a market the size of my fingernail.
The business with capital B of most popular social network sites is that they lock users in.
SN sites that support open standards do so to try succeeding on an already crowded space - yet most don’t get too far, sadly.
The idea of an aggregator that allows you to import/export/leverage/migrate data regardless of where you set camp is not new, as it’s been discussed over and over again. While I’m not playing down PeopleAggregator - hey, you won’t tell unless you try, and from what I read, they’ve done a good job at it - it’s not an easy market, and it confronts powerful SN sites with what they probably hate the most: allowing users to take their bags elsewhere with just a few clicks. While disruptive, it doesn’t seem like an easy ride ahead just because it tries to solve a big problem, indeed.
re: 1, 2, 5, & 6:
The whole point is that this isn’t only a social network, it’s a way to easily move between social networks. Openness appeals to geeks because they understand the implications of it. That same openness later appeals to the masses when one system allows them to connect to everyone, while another system only allows internal connection.
Marshall’s number portability argument is perfect here. The same thing happened with email, sms, and IM; all started as closed systems then gradually introduced interoperability.
>MacroMind became Macromedia and Canter says he’s paying penance today for the role he played in locking users into Macromedia Flash.
Marc Canter had absolutely NOTHING to do with Macromedia Flash (Canter continues to try and rewrite his bungled history).
I like this, because I would like to add a social network component to a site I’m developing, and this is a way to do and have people be able to login and use it right away.
This could be huge. Not necessarily THIS, but something like this.
While this could be useful to be the main profile on multiple groups, what makes those groups important is the metadata for them. I dont think my music groups are interested in my personal circles and the reverse, nor would I want that information shared or available between them.
Essentially my data is an advertisement or marketing tool about me in various aspects, and without the abilty to modify the quality and quantity of information to its various outlets, the site would be useless.
Basically no I dont care about how many cats a nuclear physicist has!
What would the effect of this sharing be on networks like Facebook, which, unlike MySpace, thrives on being relatively closed?
I’m a founder of a social network and in the past, we have seriously considered creating an open standard connecting all social networks together. I tend to agree with Mike, that although this is useful it simply won’t go anywhere because myspace and facebook are not going to bring down their wall gardens (and why would they). And while they control 90% of the market amongst themselves, merging web 2.0 social softwares together isnt going to have much of an impact for the masses.
What could work better is if People Aggregator doesnt attempt to be a consumer product, but works in the background providing the platform to link social networks. That way it won’t be seen as a competitor by social networks, but rather a solution provider, which might just do the trick.
there are a number of concerns that this raises with me, and they all have to do with the ability for any one firm (namely peopleaggregator) to stand as a hub amongst the distal points of multiple networks…this puts them in a unique position to analyze the relationships between parties and entities and identify or pinpoint - for example - unique marketing prospects/influencers, potential terrorists, scam artists, popular undiscovered artists and so on and so on….there’s been quite a bit of talk within http://www.insna.org about how firms like (nsa et al) might use the underlying data from these networks to look hard at dynamic relationship models, and this just makes it way easier…
for example: if a new bank emerged tomorrow promising to bridge the gap between all cc entities (associations like visa.mc and co’s like amex, discover) and the many other banks out there, along with all online payment options (paypal et al), promising a simple ’single financial identity’ to seamlessly communicate and verify your identity to support transactions, would you embrace the utility and perceived security, or be frightened by the shift to one dominant locus of control? that’s the core of this issue i think. when typical folks are on these sites, they just look at linear relationships (friendster is a perfect example, they actually drew the line on the screen for you) - but there is a stronger, richer underlying data set that exposes people to (potentially) a bit more of an identity risk than might be hoped for or articulated by the purveyors of such uniform standards…
we’re talking about people, folks, or money (per trends in financial alluded to above)…we’re not talking about my photos and favorite web sites - that’s just the here and now….this kinda stuff makes me wanna get off the grid forev-ah….
this service implies that people want their IDs to cross breed. that’s a huge assumption. if you’re a 20 something and posted during your college years on facebook or myspace, you would not necessarily want people on linkedIn to know about your page. Eventhough social networks are visual, there is still a lot of anonymity in creating a membership.
really, who wants to have their photos of crazy vegas trips with the boys linked to their professional IDs?
same reason that myspace jobsearch was a lousy idea, this may also be a hard sell.
Murtaza - actually People Aggregator is ALSO a platform that works in the background. You can spawn off your own networks on the fly within the system. AND you can also download the source code and install your own version of People Aggregator.
Horrible name. And the cell number portability analogy is flawed, because a phone numer is very different from a personal profile: a phone number is merely a way to reach someone, while a profile on a social network is heaviliy dependent on its context (e.g my linkedin profile is very different from my facebook profile).
All in all an interesting academic exercise, but with very limited practical significance if you ask me.
he’s paying penance? is it that big a burden spending the hordes of cash he has probably made from being the founder of Macromedia? I will selflessly take over the burden.
but joking aside, this is a good idea, and if they have been working on it for 3 years then it is downright visionary, but would imagine the idea has morphed quite a bit. MySpace and Facebook are just the drop in the bucket. A lot of traditional sites are going to make the move to connect their users to facilitate a more social atmosphere, so something like this could make it a lot easier. Netscape is just the first of many to make this transition. Yahoo is doing it with search (so are we http://www.searchles.com)
Social networking is not a fad, it is simply a better simulation of your real life. environment. It is a natural step for the web.
Let’s see if I can combine my Flickr friends with my new Zooomr friends.
Show me the money! Where the hell is the business model here? I love how uber-geeks throw around the word open, give away services (that don’t seem that useful in the big picture) and then wonder why they go tits up. I don’t see how this is a business with any future.
As the founder of an upcoming social networking project, I have been struggling with this very issue. My personal context is focused on empowering social networks already in existence to come together and share time, money, and expertise in a way that positively impacts the world.
At the same time, I have several friends who are starting networks of individuals and organizations with a similar context (primarily social innovation and entrepreneurship). Our networks are ’siloed,’ but given our shared context, there is a significant need and attractiveness for interoperability. Otherwise, we’re each building networks separately when we could be collaborating.
I agree that MySpace and Facebook would not “mesh,” but that’s mainly because they lack a cohesive context. Their goal is to eat up market share of “the masses,” not target groups that benefit from collaboration and integration. If you look at PeopleAggregator’s presentation, one of their goals is to enable interoperability between interest groups, such as mine.
It all depends on context. Not everyone wants to market to “the masses,” and that’s okay. Some will market to free culture geeks, other Rails geeks, moms into yoga, dads into pilates, single people into dogs, activists into progressive or conservative politics. For these kinds of affinity groups, PeopleAggregator seems critical to their shared success.
What about support of other languages? I don’t mean translation of interface (though it also would be great), but capability to blog in your own language using letters other than English.
Many web2.0 startups don’t know about existence of Unicode. And when you add for example foreign RSS feed to many online aggregators they show completely messed up text. And due to this useless for multilingual users. Don’t be San Francisco Bay Area oriented, strike for global audience.
Hi Marshall,
Thanks for another very interesting article!
I can’t wait to try PeopleAggregator: since 2002, I have been quite active in online networking, and I have been waiting for open standards and interoperability for a long time!
Chris
http://www.Visible-Networking.com
Its thrilling to see how very grown up people come with bad and naive ideas. Just because u are doing someting different or “abnormal” doesnt mean u r creative. You need to invent products that can really have a positive effect on people and also generate revenue.
I have yet to hear a clear description of this product — what the heck is it supposed to do? If you can’t even describe it in one paragraph, much less one word, how are people supposed to get interested?
And I don’t mean the uber geeks, I mean the ‘regular’ Americans who are already tired of the hype. Offer tools you can’t describe, to people already overwhelmed by tech gobbledygook? Not helpful.
Seems to suffer from bloated hype and marketing speak, on top of serious spam troubles.
Not a good start.
nr.22 wrote: “Many web2.0 startups don’t know about existence of Unicode. And when you add for example foreign RSS feed to many online aggregators they show completely messed up text. And due to this useless for multilingual users. Don’t be San Francisco Bay Area oriented, strike for global audience.”
couldn’t agree more.
These myspace or facebook and others will not open up until users demand the plasticity in porting and transfering their data/id over to other site. Just like credit card co. do now.
It will happen but not that soon
We’re working on something similar, although not as complicated. It revolves more around communication and data sharing, which will hopefully lead to tons of new applications.
I think the idea of a single web identity that can be shared through an open standard is one whose time has come. I would like to see this effort combined with that from Identity 2.0. It would be the concept of having a single .net login / identity, but it would actually have some meaning since it also would be tied up with the social networking activity that is definitely gaining traction these days.
For all of those comments above that complain that people don’t care about open standards, you’re missing the point. It doesn’t matter if people care about the WORDS ‘open standards’, but more if people are going to care if their social network connections belong to themselves or to some company like LinkedIn or MySpace. AND… with the fickle nature of trends (which something like MySpace could arguably be), I think the appeal of being able to uproot when you’ve outgrown this social hub ‘neighborhood’ could be quite appealing to anyone as long as it was marketed properly. Time will tell…
i wont waste space speculating on the peepagg target market(s) and biz plan.
my first impression of the actual UI was “It’s like web 2.0 happened in the 90’s”
my opinion of the concept is mixed. if done correctly, it could be a useful tool for organizations and interest groups… emphasis being on the “create a network” feature and the open source self-hosting option.
its definately a good exercise for a first (second?) incarnation.
bugs and poor UI aside, i think PA will have some moderate success (of course dependent on how quickly they can provide a stable product) but the from a broader perspective i would ask everyone to refresh and define what online social networking trully is. then, look at the plethora of tools and services that can provide you with what you NEED.
the web itself…. the blogosphere itself…. is a social network.
Google is too…. been to gmail lately? member of a google group?
if PA is truly for geek-minded people…. then why wouldnt these people just install a blog and use social networking plugins for a loose version of what apparently PA offers.
my typical experience with SN often result in ‘people spam’. my successes are with interest groups/mailing lists.
a friend (mmeiser.com) summed up my PA criticisms yesterday by simply saying ”
“Networking for networking’s sake is simply pointless.”
But PA DOES allow you to make a network for your specific purposes.
But how unique is that, really? Is it enough to make this project succeed?
Why not install Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla etc instead of PeepAgg?
Where is the blatant benefit here? I’m willing to get taught, but…..
sull
“…password protection is scheduled to be removed Wednesday around noon Pacific time.”
I wonder if “around noon” means “hours around noon”, “days around noon”, or maybe it’s a geological allegory?
Yuck.. That’s one UGLY website.. SO bussyyyy. They need better designers. Given how many people worked on it. I expected MORE. They got aleast a dozen indians developers working on it. I guess you get what you paid for.. GO figures…
http://digg.com/tech_news/Cant.....iaper_baby
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