Mark Evans

Who’s Going to Say the “P” Word?

It has been interesting to watch aggregation become a hot trend among the digerati as new players such as Friendfriend strive to provide people with ways to more easily manage all of their social networking activities.

In simple terms, it’s based on the concept of one-stop shopping. Why visit a number of different places (blogs, del.icio.us, RSS readers, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) if you can go to a single place to do and get it all. The digerati love the concept because their online lives are becoming more complex and difficult to manage as they add more tools into the daily mix.

For all the talk about aggregation, the word that is not being mentioned (or even whispered!) is “portal”. Think about it, what Friendfeed, Twhirl, etc. are really creating are social networking portals.

Of course, no one wants to say “portal” because it’s a dirty word associated with the dot-com boom of the late-1990s. Back then, portals (Yahoo, AOL, etc.) were all the rage because it was thought people would spend all their time on a single Web site if it offered everything they could possibly want. For some people, portals worked but many people strayed away from the one-stop shopping concept for a variety of reasons, including the fact there was not enough customization.

This led to the emergence of Portal 2.0 with personalized portals such as Pageflakes, Netvibes and iGoogle. Although far from perfect, these players gave people the ability to build their own portal pages using a variety of sources. Of these players, Netvibes (which I plan to play around with again) continues to show the most potential, especially since the recent launch of its Ginger upgrade.

We are now in the middle of Portal 3.0 where customization moves from content, RSS feeds, etc. to social networking services. There is a race happening to see who can become the social networking portal. Friendfeed has the most momentum while Twhirl and others are scrambling to keep pace.

In theory, social networking portals make sense so people can monitor their digital lives but the question is whether enough people will use multiple social networks to justify using a social networking portal. As Facebook users, for example, migrate to Twitter, do they really want a service to monitor Facebook and Twitter, or simple a Twitter service?

In any event, the portal is back whether you want to admit it or not.

Update: Speaking of Twitter, TechCrunch suggests that “a flip or flop proposition” given it has no discernible business plan yet, and appears to be running out of money.

Technorati Tags: FriendFeed, Netvibes, Portals, Twhirl, Twitter