There's a mind-numbing amount of conversations and transactions going on around the internet these days and quality aggregation of content is a very hot trend. When is more too much, though? Are some aggregation services shooting themselves in the foot by sacrificing quality for breadth? Is this madness and does it need to stop?
Call it feature creep, call it "so meta it hurts," it appears that a growing class of websites run the risk of aggregating too much. Maybe that's not the case, but there are some issues and we're going to write about them. We'll also offer collected examples of sites that take one strategy or another - you can let us know if our own aggregation here is too much.
Sometimes it's a simple matter of priorities. Do you focus on developing the most effective user experience you can, or do you extend your service to as many niche user groups as possible? The best case scenario of course would not require such a choice to make, but for startups seeking to innovate - that choice often does have to be made.
Look at lifestreaming apps FriendFeed vs. awkwardly named competitor Profilactic. (profiles+disease prevention?).
FriendFeed has nailed user experience. It's simple, easy to use, recommends friends till the cows come home and is a great place to communicate about much of your friends' social media content. The number of sources you can associate with your profile is limited, however. At least compared to Profilactic it is.
FriendFeed lets you share content from 35 different services around the web and ironically, that looks like the focused option compared to Profilactic's 177 and growing.
What's not to love about Profilactic's support for super-awesome services like music mix sharing service Muxtape and the RSS community Toluu? That's awesome. Except not very many people use those services. In the mean time, I don't want to use Profilactic and neither do most of my friends. I could use it without them but that's not as much fun as using FriendFeed.
It seems to me that Profilactic has sacrificed user experience for long tail support. That's a sacrifice that probably won't serve them well. None the less, we wish them the best.
Breadth doesn't have to be sacrificed for ease of use, though. To test this theory out I just bought a t-shirt through the meta-T-shirt aggregation voting site experience Rumplo. It was just as easy as buying a shirt through one of a million T-shirt sites (which I had to do eventually, Rumplo is just a voted-on directory) and it was fun. Watch out for shipping and handling prices on some of those sites though, ouch.
In the brick and mortar world, commercial enterprises tend to have to choose between offering diverse niche goods on one hand or buying and selling the most popular goods in bulk and reduced rates. The lack of physical inventory requirements and the low incremental cost in offering most digital goods means this dilemma may not translate online (news flash!).
You can get as nichey as you want online and still scale fairly large, it appears. Is that the lesson of Last.fm and Pandora?
Perhaps the way this dynamic can still come into play is the aggregation of aggregations. Perhaps offering collections of obscure collections gets too complicated and mitigates the network effects of a large user base that can come from a more accessible user experience. Music playlist social network Imeem suggests that's not necessarily the case.
It doesn't appear that greater levels of aggregation has to lead to a loss of niche content for the sake of economies of scale.
As Sarah Perez wrote here last month in her post The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere there are now comments being left all over the place. Just as some people get frustrated when the full text of their content gets "aggregated" and they lose out on pageviews, others are growing frustrated that comments aren't being left all in one place.
Fortunately, there's people working on this problem as well. Check out Sarah's post yesterday on YackTrack, a service you can use to look up all the comments left around the web - on or about a particular URL. You can even use this bookmarklet: YackTrack It!.
Yesterday we wrote up BooRah, a company that aggregates restaurant reviews from all around the web and analyzes them for emotional content. That's one way that aggregation can help centralize comments.
Dispersed comments don't have to be a major problem coming out of continued aggregation. It's going to be ok.
After looking at the questions above, the only remaining problem left really unsolved may be user back backlash. You can aggregate all day long but users may feel like it's just too much.
We would argue, however, that a well executed user experience and perhaps some solid recommendation technology is going to be able to smooth most of the wrinkles that come from these increasing layers of aggregation.
Top image: jrhode
Comments
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Good post.
In http://secondbrain.com we put all content that we aggregate into a library and allow users to remix it into collections. The lifestream with social updates and comments is kept on a separate page.
We believe that separating these two features makes it easier for people to keep track of updates as well as manage their content.
Posted by: Lars Teigen | April 29, 2008 1:30 PM
Hey Marshall,
Thanks for the Toluu shout out! As you know we are still in private beta so our userbase is not massive yet, however we would love to be integrated into FriendFeed as a default someday soon.
I agree that a killer user experience wins out, and is not mutually exclusive of great selection. The thing is, exposing the long tail of content is not just about presenting it in a big list, it is more about context. Creating interesting sorting and smart filtering methods based on usage is critical to making massive selection not overwhelming.
Posted by: Caleb Elston | April 29, 2008 2:03 PM
Give Lifestream.fm a try:
http://lifestream.fm
Posted by: Juan Xavier Larrea | April 29, 2008 2:46 PM
Would love to hear your rationale for your comments about Profilactic. You never really explain why supporting more sites hurts the user experience.
You also never explain the random comment about you and your friends not using Profilactic. Is it the name? The user experience?
I know these comments inevitably come off as sour grapes; however, we can take criticism with the best of them. We would just like to see you explain your comments so that we can evaluate where we have areas to improve.
I've posted more thoughts on our Profilactic blog:
http://tinyurl.com/6oxwtl
Posted by: smorty71 | April 29, 2008 2:48 PM
Marshall, I love ya but I have to not only echo Smorty's questions above (yes, Smorty and I are friends, but so are we) but point out that your argument of sacrificing user experience doesn't make a lot of sense from another perspective. Profilactic not only offers more sites (and nothing is hurt or distracting if you don't use certain ones) but offers blog badges and a clippings service, neither of which I've been able to find on FriendFeed. By that rationale -- Profilactic offers more sites and services -- they have a better user experience than other services, including FriendFeed.
Respectful disagreement on this end, man. Nothing against FriendFeed. Profilactic's just better.
Posted by: Jason Falls | April 29, 2008 4:15 PM
Sorry to have been offline all day since writing this article. I've responded to Profilactic's comments here on their blog - http://www.profilactic.com/blog/index.htm
Interested readers can check out the discussion over there, and try out their service while you're there! Please tell me I'm wrong and it's actually more usable than it's seemed to me so far.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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April 29, 2008 6:27 PM
Marshall, Thanks for posting a follow up over on our blog. I appreciate you giving us specific examples of areas where we can improve. That's the kind of feedback we need to keep moving forward.
Fortunately, a lot of those things are in the works. Hopefully, what you'll see on Profilactic in the next couple of weeks will address some of your comments.
Posted by: smorty71 | April 29, 2008 9:17 PM
Dude - its not a matter of smoothing wrinkles - rather than of explicit purpose. If you WANT to track niche content - you should be able to. The more the merrier is not always best.
But having a simple UI and compelling experience is always important and users are voting on FriendFeed. That doesn't mean others won't be to get into this sector - but it's just ONE feature - remember.
Its how you use this kind of 'people subscription' feature for other purposes - and in different contexts - which will prove more significant.
Posted by: Marc Canter | April 30, 2008 3:16 PM
Great summary of why we now face an information overload issue.
I think that the awaited killer app of web semantic would cope with it.
Because when you face too much information, you have to filter it depending on your context. Sometimes you wanna have a sneak preview of what topics are suddenly raising, sometimes you just want to limit your view to a particular topic.
This is a totally new way of thinking as previously we only filtered content on one axe: "Is this content good for you that you will bookmark it (delicious), digg it, or whatsoever"
That's what we do at http://commentag.com
We proposed wordpress plugin which combines web semantic and UGT (User Generated Tags) to allow filtering of discussions based on topics (eg. arguments being defended) instead of rating.
Posted by: xavier | May 1, 2008 11:30 PM