Content Aggregation Changing Trends

Content Aggregation, Storage, Processing and Delivery

Aggregated content can be viewed as “human-aggregated” and “machine aggregated” content. As the Web is an interactive entity, we should have access to services that use both technologies and rich media. Services like Secondbrain, FriendFeed, Profilactic and others are pioneers in a field known as “social content aggregation” – and the only social content aggregator that employs rich media on its platform is Secondbrain.

Secondbrain created an aggregator that uses both aspects to deliver the best possible results, because creating “the Web’s largest user-generated content library” depends equally on users’ contribution, resources and the technology to store and aggregate data.

With storage and processing in place, Secondbrain faces another challenge: delivery. So far SB has the best aggregated content delivery platform on the Web, flexible and to an extent even customizable.

As of today the service allows rich media previews from all video sites, without the need of a supported SB account.

But all these social aggregators still have a long way to go to become our “services of the future”, so to speak. The popularity of a FriendFeed doesn’t make the service the ideal tool for discovering quality content, organizing, collaborating and sharing knowledge. Social aggregators should go beyond being “spamming” tools to actually becoming hubs of information and education.

Machine Aggregated Content Is Not Enough…

Search engines like Google can serve as basis to understand how machine data aggregation and processing works. Web pages are automatically scanned by bots and indexed (stored) on web servers.

The information is processed with complex algorithms to categorize these pages based on language, geo location, topic, etc. As for delivery, we know that search engines count on complex algorithms to match search queries based on keywords and keyword phrases. Even in the modern world of semantics the words still remain the key to finding information online.

While finding information with the help of a search engine is relatively easy, users still have a problem with “saving” the pages they like. The search engines don’t offer all necessary tools for research. Google has a “note” feature that helps users store their finds in their Google Notebook, but this feature is absent from Google search if the users are not logged into their Google accounts.

Although the “Notebook” is flexible enough – enabling users to label/tag their discoveries, to share with friends by inviting collaborators or to even publish their discoveries on live web pages (I’ve created an example including some of Pamil Visions’ business partners) – the service is far from being popular. On the live pages you publish via Google Notebook there are no “comments” enabled to allow for visitor feedback, and many other customized features are missing.

Human Aggregated Content Is Not Enough Either…

As the web becomes more and more interactive, it’s surprising that Google didn’t find a way (other than via blog pages) to enable users to build dynamic web presences.

Human aggregated content hubs like blogs and some news sites are based exclusively on humans’ explicit choices of what content to include. The content is then shared trough blog feeds, bookmarks and links.

The need of “sharing” human aggregated content led to the foundation of social discovery, social bookmarking and other social networks that enable users to submit their favorites and share them with the world.

Different types of content reside on different types of social sites: we have news aggregators, image aggregators, video aggregators and even music aggregators; then aggregators that try to satisfy the needs of all users by including all types of content. The more content added, the more difficult it becomes for the users to find what they are looking for. Finding bookmarks and saved links becomes then a time-consuming task, despite the search tools provided by the networks and despite all tags.

Technology that Integrates both Human and Machine Aggregated Content

A social content aggregator is powered by both technology and user contribution. Profilactic, FriendFeed and others, aggregate content from different online services but their “bots” only access data they were given access to by the users of these services. Basically the users create a profile and then choose which services they want to integrate in their “mega profiles.” Then the social aggregators “grab” content they were given access to and make it available on the user’s profile via a “live” lifestream. This lifestream displays content based on freshness, pretty much as the news aggregators. To access older content users need to browse through tags and hundreds of pages saved within their profiles.

In a social content aggregator keywords become “tags.” Some aggregators show a tag cloud, which enables users to find all pages related to a specific tag without using the search bar. Yet the search bar remains there to be used when there’s no relevant tag present in the cloud, or to refine search results.

Secondbrain is differentiates itself from FriendFeed & Co by refining the content delivery process : enabling users to organize their bookmarks, links and various types of content into collections.

Almost a month ago Secondbrain announced its 10000 user signup and the launch of more social media services, including Mister Wong, FriendFeed, Facebook, Diigo, Reddit, Mixx, Tumblr, Qik, Goodreads and Behance. In a release bonanza published by Audun on August 12, Secondbrain announced its intentions of adding even more services to its platform and today I noticed that the service even embeds rich media on site. This is a feature no other social aggregator has, and the advantage is that the users and their friends/visitors can view the videos on their Secondbrain accounts, without being forced to leave the site.

Many other features make Secondbrain one of the best social aggregators on the Web, but the purpose of the company is to push the envelope of online collaboration further, and to become a main hub of information on the Web. By the way things are evolving at SB, I see this as a realizable ideal.

The Ideal Social Aggregator

The ideal social aggregator embeds all Secondbrain actual features plus some extras:

• Customizable skins and drag and drop UI – to enable the user organize the layout of the page according to his/her needs pretty much as Zude used to provide, unfortunately now the service is closed. Collaboration with services like Iceberg would greatly benefit UI development.
• Enhanced networking functionality, especially the ability to “invite collaborators” and send direct messages to followers and friends within the community; and also the ability to create collaboration groups.
• Extended “notes” for the saved bookmarks – right now Secondbrain only allows a “twitter type” of notes. It would be more useful for the users to be able to write compelling notes, to be able to add related links to the same entry, images, video and more.
• The possibility to “import” collections to the desktop.
• User tailored syndication features that go beyond RSS and search engine indexing.

The Way to Greatness

It’s not hard to build the ultimate online resource, and least not in theory. Keeping such a resource free for the general public… well, that’s another story. Google manages to keep its search engine and other tools free because it generates revenue through ads and other ventures. Strangely enough no one complains when seeing “sponsored” ads in their search results, but many raise to speak against all other sites displaying ads. Because the users don’t like ads, many services trying to “satisfy the masses” are forced to seek out other sources of income and struggle to “survive.”

Zude was forced to discontinue its free services and focus on enterprise audience. Streamy – which was once described by a CNET author as a “digg killer” – is just hanging out, waiting probably for funding. Particls closed beta as well and the list could go on. There is no way to keep a service free with inferior funding and no revenue scheme.

Social aggregators have an “easy” life as they use open source APIs a lot, but they still need to develop their own applications to improve user experience, to enrich content delivery and in the end to become accessible for all users.

Such services have the alternative to join efforts with development startups and to exchange technology. This is how these companies could cut development costs and remain aligned to the principles of collaboration that drive the movement we like to call “Web 2.0” Finding creative ways to generate revenue without lowering user experience would be the next challenge, since ads are the most popular Web 2.0 revenue model. Social aggregators could find a way to generate revenue by charging companies a fee to display their news as “featured” based on user preferences, topic (tag) etc, similar to the revenue model used by StumbleUpon.

Note: Secondbrain and Iceberg are Pamil Visions partners.