The popularity of social networks continues to rise, but there are more of them than you can shake a stick at. See, for example, our recent coverage of social networks for families, dog lovers, teens, tweens, and even old fogies.
In a fragmented world, where OpenID is still far from standard with social networking sites (just look at the OpenID directory), there’s definitely room for a third party to fill the gap. Loopster is the newest application, along with Profilactic and ProfileLinker, trying to help people wrangle these disparate networks into an easily consumable, unified format.
Profilactic focuses on aggregating your social network data and creating feeds that are mashups of the different content you and your friends produce (MySpace blogs, Dugg stories, etc.). ProfileLinker focuses on creating a single interface to all of your social networking accounts, notifying you of friend updates, messages, and search all your networks at once. They are continually adding new networks to their collection of 75 so far.
Loopster takes a more basic approach than Profilactic and ProfileLinker, aiming to be a “RSS feed” for your friend’s updates across the multiple networks (although they don’t actually offer a RSS feed yet).
Once you’ve registered with Loopster, you hand over your credentials for MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Live Journal, or your Blogger user name and click “Add”. This gets Loopster’s crawlers working. They log in to each of these sites on your behalf and traverse your friend network, grabbing their names, bios, interests, and details (this takes quite a while).
You interact with your friend’s profiles through a main page with a grid of all of your friends from each network. Whenever a friend’s profile is updated, their profile lights up with a “new” icon and a note about what has changed. You can either click through to Loopster’s summarized version of the profile or click directly through to the original source. Since you probably have some overlap between the friends in each of these networks, Loopster also lets you merge together profiles of the same person from different networks. However, the program is still a little buggy and I wound up with multiple copies of the same profile. This was probably due to some impatient clicking of the “add friends” button, which sent multiple crawlers to the same site, grabbing the same info.
The off label methods these sites use to crawl social networks puts them in a somewhat precarious position. MySpace doesn’t have an API for its site, and has been known to send some nasty C&D letters to people who crawl their network. Singlestat.us is one MySpace victim and their competitor DatingAnyone is also dead.
Sites like Loopster are a sign of a mini revolution happening with the social web, where instead of managing and linking documents, we are managing and linking personal identities. Traditional search engines like Yahoo and Google are very poor at discovering and managing this information since social relationships aren’t always hyperlinked. This is the gap that sites like Wink, Streakr, and semantic web startup Metaweb are trying to fill.
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seems to be a trend of social sites linking together now, http://www.emokoo.com did this a few months back
it seems there are many people who don’t know what to do with their free time. maybe they are unemployed or boring to much. who is using all these social sites?
I’m curious if the previous comment is really from Mark Zuckerberg and if it is, why he felt necessity to write it
Its not from him, why would he refer to himself in third person and post a poorly written comment.
“The Internet is The Lazy Man’s Way to getting rich”. Is it really. If it was back then, it is not anymore.
WEll looks like the work of Original Application manufactureres in developing standards and interoperable applications have to be done by third parties. Poor standard of service.
http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com
Mark, thanks for your post. You crack me up. Your other pseudonym or should I say, impersonation - Chad Hurley, is very funny - esp when Techcrunch writes anything around YT.
It will be fun to see more pseudonyms, with long hillarious comments - maybe Larry Page, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, George Bush (in case Mike vers to writing about politics)
I don’t think MySpace’s C&D would have a leg to stand on when it comes to crawlers…
From the MySpace robots.txt file:
—-
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
—-
The only robot that they wish to exclude from crawling is the ia_archiver — the “way back machine.”
Mark’s post has to be the biggest insult to all of us wanna-be internet entrepreneurs.
I designed and launched an internet social community just as myspace was becoming popular (before it was acquired). It was of good quality — but it never caught on.
I also created a digg style website well before digg was launched (1999), but it never caught on despite marketing efforts etc.
I am an advanced web developer — I have created numerous websites — none of which have been successful enough to make me millions. Why? Because Mark is purposely leavnig out the biggest factor: LUCK.
He won the lottery alright. And in order to win the lotter you need LUCK.
Mark is not smart or a genius or a great entrepreneur, he like others, was LUCKY.
Stop trolling Mark.
More often than not, Xing is missing in the list of supported sites, so also at Loopster. Too bad - most of my contacts are in Xing.
Does anybody know a social aggregator that also supports Xing? I’d love to use one, to be notified of updates to my Xing contacts. Xing doesn’t do that for me - bad Xing!
Maol - I’m the co-founder of loopster. We are working on adding more crawlers and xing will be added in the future. Thanks for the comments everyone. I’m very interested in improving loopster, so its all appreciated.
If you’re Mark Zuckerberg I’m Larry Page and Larry Wall as well… where’s the link to this post in your blog?
I agree with you Bobafett. Luck or karma, the most important factors, are always omitted
Unfortunately.
While i think these sites are really important (they complement the original service), i never been a fan of site that build their market on another service, same as widget provided by 3rd Parties.
Usually their market are so unstable, a block from the service or a C&D letter could kill any of theses sites/widgets.
There are lot of these (connecting) services. Nobody is doing it for Orkut. There is a large community on orkut. I guess they don’t have some API or platform to integrate with other services.
Do any of these social network aggregators get traction, or do they just stagnate, like - for instance - the meta search engines that pop up all of the time?
I worry for a lot of these companies (not NECESSARILY the one being profiled here). But I sense bubble. Many of these just will not make it.
I definitely think there’s a market for relationship aggregation and XFN-type tags (semantics). This would eventually lead to a central data point for everyone…
The web is so fragmented right now. Each user generates a lot of content, but none of that content is really linked to the user. Take item listings, for example. If I want to buy something, it’s pretty sad that I can’t just lookup my friends and cross search all of their listings several degrees out.
It’s pretty sad when the internet brings anonymous people closer together than those who are actually related.
I think Loopster is a *start* in the right direction, but I think it’s really limited by it’s position as a “profile manager”
Missing from the list of people to connect are game players. Connecting people from various mini games, game networks, mmorpg’s, etc would have a large impact.
So maybe now there will be a mad rush to create an aggregator aggregator… so i can manage my loopster account, my profilactic account, and my profilelinker account, all from one place… but then of course, if a competing service comes out, i may need an aggregator so i can manage all my aggregator aggregator accounts. will the madness ever end??
Hi Brian…awesome idea, it adds value unlike a lot of companies covered by techcrunch. Keep innovating and it will take off! Only suggestion, the logo is somewhat forgettable so I think you guys could revamp it; especially since the majority of myspacers and niche social network people are young, they may be more interested in a more playful, but still professional logo. Also, on the front page, maybe a screenshot of the ease of use of what a loopster user may see when logged in…so it doesn’t look too much like every web 2.0 turnkey solution front page.
Good luck!
How can anyone believe that that is actually Mark. The tone in the quotes of Mark Z and the tone in Chad quotes are the same. I just don’t understand why you need to make this stuff up? If this was seriously quoted, a simple search online would pull them from reputable sources, not spam comments in blogs. Seriously, I think we’re smarter than to believe its real so stop spamming. It’s just annoying.
I agree with Lawrence above…
In all actuality, I think those posts should be removed - they’re pointless and degrading to everyone’s intelligence. I think “Mark” and #12 are conspiring
Why use the ageist and insulting term: old fogies - when your link leads to this comment… “this age group is perfectly capable of using Yahoo for a portal, Vox for a blogging platform.”
Twitter me, skype me, call me on 8×8, text me, email me, or comment on my blog, I’ll be interested to hear the justification for calling me an old fogie.
I have to admit, the “Mark Zuckerberg” post is hilarious!
Nick,
Thanks for mentioning Profilactic. We actually just came out of beta today. So if you haven’t been to the site in a while, check us out.
Here is an update on what’s new:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2fe37b
Check us out at http://www.profilactic.com.
Micheal… Please get rid of the “snap.com” previews.
It makes little difference whether the real or fake Mark Z posted, the facebook story really taught us something. I think Mark got the right points:
“people are lazy, desperate for information and insecure”. Every industrial revolution was about coming up new ways to deal with these.
in reply to #17
what did google do? they built a business on other websites.
and they are earning decent money.
so this is definitely interesting.
I wonder how the crawling takes place? brian?
because I could imagine some of these sites not liking it very much if one ip address causes 10 gig of traffic everyday while allowing users to use their network without clicking on their ads.
Peter, that is a very valid question.
The following is taken from out site, but its applicable to your question: We do not believe our service is in any way diverting traffic from other sites. On the contrary, by making it easier to see when something has changed about a person we believe we are driving traffic to these sites and adding value to our users as well as to the other social networking sites. The average user will not sit down when they have a few minutes to click on every one of their friend/contacts/subscriptions on every site out there to see if something has changed. It is just too much work to go to 20 different sites and check up on everything you would want to. On the other hand, when someone visits Loopster and sees activity on someone else’s account they can go right to the page where the information was posted.
This of course is our belief - we’ve only been online a short time so only time will tell how many referrers we’re sending back to these social networks such as facebook, myspace, etc.
Thanks for all the comments. Trust me, I’m very busy taking all concerns/bug reports/enhancement requests into account for future releases.
Brian
Co-founder of Loopster
I had a really good read on this, very detail,
and very useful information.Thanks.
MPEG to Zune
http://www.mpeg-converter.net
I agree with some of what Mark says, but as a successful entrepreneur myself, I am a bit disappointed in his delivery.
Humility goes a long way, and I am certain that the tone of his comments are viewed as insults, by his employees, his family and many others.
It is a sign of immaturity, I hope Mark grows up. He is in a position to be a leader, but he is acting like a spoiled child.
So a startup that ironically markets to my university on facebook (http://uloop.com) has almost the exact same logo as loopster, and I’m curious if they’re the same company, or if one of em’s going to get in trouble soon for having the same logo.
Maybe it’s just obvious that a double O word can easily be made into a smiley face.
On the facebook note, while I highly doubt it’s Zuckerberg, facebook has become such an institution in college that he can almost say whatever he wants.
And now I know why only the first two sentences of my articles are read
Great article Nick! Interesting synopsis of half of Web 2.0 Mark. All that junk they taught is in ethics and philosophy just taxed our minds so that we could not perfect the Internet version of vacuum cleaner sales. LMAO
Actually there is a site like this for Orkut, at orkurioso.com.
It is only portuguese and the signup will be back in the next two weeks.
Now I also know that really online “as here” there are ideas that could change someones existance online and his ways of reaching what he want .. !
Great to know that .
Sorry about my last comment link .. mistake was done .. but what i hate is that people think I am antonella Barba which is not .. although I love sharing these commenst with such a blog like ,, it is very useful .. but I am just a noral person that ANtonELLA !
Unless social-networks will actually open-up, i dont think this site will prosper. But i agree to some, this can start of a new revolution.
Loopster guys - cool idea, good luck, please prove me wrong but I think your business model sucks.
This is worse than RockYou and stuff like that. Meebo raising millions of dollars? Where is all of this advertising driven revenue going to come from? Don’t people make money by charging users anymore?
What’s next? Procter & Gamble to invest in Web 2.0 startup that gives away virtual shampoo sponsored by advertising?
This is a big shell game. There is not enough advertising in the world to support all of these sites.
Wow, that was some post by our illustrious Facebook founder. Mark, I had no idea you had such malice towards firms that aren’t willing to unload 8 billion for Facebook. So by you’re own logic, MySpace is worth 2-3 times as much as NewsCorp? Wow, they got a great discount. Mature social networking sites are just too volatile for publicly traded companies to take big bets on. Because they just can’t justify the economics. The inflation is incredible. These companies want to get a good return on their investment, with the discounted cash flows yielding a much higher rate of return than other investments. Social networking is too volatile, with blogs controlling most of the future growth in the online advertising market.
already offline? myspace friendly laywers or who?
I had a really good read on this, very detail,
and very useful information.Thanks.
RM to Zune
http://www.rm-converter.net
Looks like their server got crunched. Alexa showed several spikes up around 10K, can’t get data from Compete.
I really don’t think there is any sort of legal violation, at least with MySpace. I’m pretty familiar with MySpace’s policy; for the most part, they are pretty relaxed when it comes to crawling and aggregating. The problem seems to be embeddable widgets [which is somewhat justified given the current spamfest going on over there].
Yes there are a plethora of social websites lying around. Sites like Digg.com were created for US$200 using elance. That doesn’t mean to say that new sites shouldn’t come up. Yes they have every right to come up but surviving long time is a different ball game. Unless the new websites innovate they have fat chance of pulling loyal users from other social websites.
The server did get crunched. Its been back online for a few days and appears more stable now.