Aside from the business opportunity, it gets down to who owns your friendships and your communications with them, you or some service? I say that that the farther away we get from each user owning his own social network and correspondence the farther we're going towards another monopoly situation that will take drastic action to fix. So this isn't just a business idea, it has some serious roots as well.
A side project our company (Citrusbyte) has been working on is OpenFriends (http://getopenfriends.com/). It is an universal friending system, which then can be subscribed to by various services (myspace, facebook, forums). We've been busy with our day jobs (consulting), so we haven't had a chance to polish it quite as far as it could be but your comment about users owning their own social network immediately made the connection in my head. Check it out, and shoot any feedback my way.
This is essentially what we have been writing at friendbinder [http://friendbinder.com] for a couple of years now. There are also a number of other systems attempting the same thing. One of the key issues is lack of standards in the APIs and RSS/Atom are not designed for this.
Hey, i like this. It looks like a cheap copy of Friendfeed, but it is what Friendfeed should have become. Friendfeed focused on lifestreaming instead of aggregation. I'd just need Tumblr integration and i could ditch Friendfeed.
FYI, as it happens, it's not a copy of anything, friendfeed didn't exist when we started. It's just taking us longer because we don't have ~10 ex-googlers working on it.
Your right it's what FriendFeed should have done/become, though for some reason they didn't.
The only non-standard challenge presented by this project is the need to develop screen-scraping regular expressions for individual online communities that are run on custom software.
My spider-senses are tingling. I don't like the sound of this one bit.
I do like the sound of aggregated community, though, but here's an interesting question: how many communities is the average real person part of, these days? Aren't half of them on Facebook now? Plus, doesn't Google Wave.. sort of.. provide an alternative? Or maybe that could be the ultimate destination, the viewer if you will, on this stream of aggregation.
I'm starting to see the beginnings of an new trend here. Since Google Wave does everything and replaces everything on the internet, I have a feeling that all new startups and business ideas will garner the response, "Doesn't Google Wave do this already?"
A spider, in my opinion, is a tool that some service uses to collect information from other sites to repackage and sell on their site.
If I'm a user of several sites, and I automate my own browser to collect just information of relevance to me and put it on my own site/app/whatever, then that's simply a matter of the presentation of material, not a business in it's own right. Or another way to look at it is -- supposed I rewrote a browser to check all social sites and display the web pages in an aggregated format for the user. That's not creating competition, that's arranging data to make it more consumable, which is what the web is supposed to be about.
I know I'm a member of half a dozen sites, most of which I don't visit very much because of the inconvenience. With some kind of aggregator, I could participate easily in many more networks and broaden my social reach, which is a benefit.
I think I must have missed something. This doesn't seem like a new idea at all.
The existing methods are described as either RSS or one giant site (ala Facebook) and the solution is described as a giant news aggregator (with some social based filtering) coupled with each community site integrating OpenID.
I've wanted something quite like this. I want to be able to discuss any topic with a group of thoughtful people. Most communities instead restrict solely by topic. Basically, I want the old usenet back.
I'm not sure if the best solution is to scrape a bunch of communities, or just create one central site, that becomes so powerful it sucks in all the great/people conversations (eg wikipedia).
It is not until half way through that one realises . . .
> "The only non-standard challenge presented by this project is the need to develop screen-scraping regular expressions for individual online communities that are run on custom software."
. . . that the whole idea has a notable form: a simple, mundane problem, hiding a big, hard problem. If you could solve the hard problem you would think you could do much more than help Joe Average with photography and flying.
> "This can be done on-demand."
It is perhaps a test of one's bias: from a business viewpoint, you probably would not think anything of it, but technically it is naggingly unsatisfactory.
It would be a great idea if it found some neat shortcut for the big hard problem that happened to specially fit the particular mundane problem . . .
Create an API, implement it in WordPress, phpBB, moveable type and get everyone else to implement it - then writing an aggregator would be a lot easier.
In fact, without reading this, I just asked HN if anybody else would be interested in collaborating on something just like this.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896015
Aside from the business opportunity, it gets down to who owns your friendships and your communications with them, you or some service? I say that that the farther away we get from each user owning his own social network and correspondence the farther we're going towards another monopoly situation that will take drastic action to fix. So this isn't just a business idea, it has some serious roots as well.