I was interested to note that RSS aggregator netvibes has gone social with the release of their upgrade codenamed ‘ginger’. At first glance it appears netvibes is reaching into the social networking space by offering functionality seen in other social networking sites like Facebook. You still have your back-end reader and widget pages but now you can register your ‘universe’ on netvibes and have a public face with your selection of apps and widgits.
I will play with it a little, tech tinkering for want of a better phrase, but at the end of the day enough is enough which in a way is a pity because I just can’t keep up.
Here is a short list of areas I am plugged into (top items of highest importance) and keeping track of these is fast becoming more hard work than fun.
Social Networks
Blog
- WordPress
- Ipernity
Photo Sharing
- Flickr
- Ipernity
- Redbubble
- iStockPhoto
RSS
- Newsgator
- Google Reader
- Netvibes
Messaging
- Skype
- MSN Messenger
- Meebo
- Google Talk
And the list goes on. So as new companies bring new content to the web I find less time and less inclination to actually go and look at them. Sure App A may be technically superior or more beautiful than App B but as in the case of Facebook, my network is there, most of my friends are there; I’m not going to persuade them to move to the latest new thing so I will keep using Facebook. Same thing with Pownce – awesome functionality – nobody there I know yet.
Google’s open social network excites me a little; I believe that opening up the web and providing common bits of code which can run independently across different companies is a way of unlocking us so we aren’t necessarily tied into one application for too long.
The big problem for new startups however is that unless you’re first to market or able to provide a radical new service, something so outrageous as to attract a huge cloud of interest and potential migration up front, breaking in to the existing spaces like social networking is going to be a hard and unrewarding slog. So although netvibes has some cool new features and wizzbang widgits I am not likely to change from my existing social platform any time soon.
p.s. There are some tools to help manage these various services. My preference for pulling Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress & del.icio.us under one roof is the Flock browser. Flock is built on Firefox but has additional hooks into all of the aforesaid applications giving you complete control over all of them right from your browser.
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