I just found out about a site called PeopleAggregator (Via TechCrunch) which aggregates your online identity from various social networking sites into one place. Not only is it a social network itself (that part I’m not all that excited
about as they’re a dime a dozen these days), but you’ll be able to view, update, and maintain all of your existing social networks from this one central location. It works with all the social networks that actually support open API’s and expose their data to the outside world (meaning, pretty much all of them except for MySpace).
This is great for a few reasons. First, I don’t have enough time to update all the social networks I use regularly, and this will help with that. Second, if you decide to stop using a particular network or add a new one, no biggie, you just tell PeopleAggregator about it. Third, if all of the social networks besides MySpace can come together and form a unified front of some type, it just might create enough of a snowball effect to put a dent in the MySpace armor. That will be a happy day indeed (if you’re wondering why I’m so down on MySpace, check out this post and this post). Fourth, they’re supporting pretty much all of the integrated online identity standards out there (such as OpenID), so you can use whichever one puts a smile on your face.
The coolest thing about PeopleAggregator is their open API’s. They’re opening up their system to anyone on the Web, and encouraging developers to use them to create applications and create new API’s. What’s just awesome, though, is that the PeopleAggregator API’s are essentially aggregated API’s into all of the social networks that PeopleAggregator works with. So somebody who wants to write something like SingleStat.us, which MySpace recently litigated out of existence, is not only free to write it, but they’re also empowered to write the software in such a way that it’ll work with any of the social networks supported by PeopleAggregator. That’s cool.
Another reason I have high hopes for PeopleAggregator is that they don’t put themselves in the center of the solution and say that you HAVE to use their service. Instead, they act as sort of a decentralized gateway to other social networking sites, which means that if another service that does the same thing pops up, you can easily switch and start using it instead of PeopleAggregator. This is a great example of a free market in action, which has been sorely missing from Web startups recently. I love the idea of using the BEST site for the job, not the FIRST site. It takes confidence in your product to create it in this way, and I applaud PeopleAggregator for that.
Hopefully PeopleAggregator and services like it will make the other social networks so much more useful and functional than MySpace that MySpace’s huge userbase becomes less and less of an advantage. The entire Internet will be developing applications for the other networks, and is basically prohibited from writing applications for MySpace. Long-term, I’d place my bets on the Internet horse rather than MySpace’s internal developers, which I have very little respect for to begin with.
