Yesterday I eavesdropped on a short Twitter conversation between Charlie and John. Here’s images for the threads - Charlie’s stream and John’s. In short Charlie was saying that he finds little value with the lifestreaming services and John, who works at Plaxo, wanted to know why.
Charlie’s answer? Lack of context. Interestingly, Charlie’s issue with context was with the relevancy of friends.
I jumped in with my $0.02, saying that it wasn’t limited to a lack of context with friends, but also included contextual issues with location/time of the content consumption. We’ve all talked about this problem at length on the BlueBlog so I won’t revisit this here.
But John’s question in response, “Is that a general criticism of social media feed aggregation?”, got me thinking. I don’t have a clear answer to this, but I think working through it can be beneficial for all of us [note: this translates to "rough thoughts lie ahead"].
Is the time/location contextual issue a general criticism of feed aggregation?
There are times and instances when the current structure of feed aggregation works well. Lately, Robert Scoble has been talking a lot about the benefit of the aggregated conversation at FriendFeed. It’s an example of the benefit of centralized feed aggregation.
This makes sense. Decentralized content and conversations that are occurring around a similar topic are pulled together into a common conversation stream. From timing and location perspectives it’s contextually correct and provides real benefit.
For close friends, with activities of a certain nature, I benefit from feed aggregation. Facebook’s newsfeed is a good example of this. This also makes sense - I wanted to experience a “social sixth sense” with those closest to me.
Time and location context issues arises when, for example, a Last.fm entry appears in the lifestream. Are you looking to discover music while conversing? The appearance of content like this, at this time, is noise. Noise that supports feed aggregation criticism.
Scoble recently said that the /discussion page on FriendFeed is where the value of the service lies. Which makes sense but leads me to a bunch of other questions:
If the aggregated conversation is the value, what’s the benefit of adding feeds that aren’t conversational in nature? In terms of # of feeds, do feed aggregation services exhibit diminishing marginal returns? Is the inclusion of certain feeds a negative to the service? Are different aggregation services necessary, constrained and focused on different feeds and experiences? And, finally, when does the aggregation of Last.fm-type (nonconversational) feeds make sense?
Update: Corvida at R/WW has a post up titled “Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media” that’s related to the thoughts above. Corvida discusses how different aggregation platforms should be used for different purposes and how different services cater to different audiences. Bingo.
Corvida concludes with the following: “Instead of being able to freely add whatever service you wish, some users like myself are taking into account what others may consider noise on certain services as a courtesy to members. In essence, you are becoming our own filter.” And then calls for better filters for the services. Filters and context - the missing pieces of social aggregation.
