One thing is already certain in 2008, social media and user data is migrating from disparate sources and networks to more centralized schemas. Imagine how much time you have invested registering for 4 different social networks (Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Orkut) and 2 different social blog communities (Mybloglog, BlogCatalog) and 3 different social book marking tools like (delicious, stumbleupon and digg). That is a tremendous amount of personal data, usernames, passwords and profiles that need updating and tracking. This is where companies like Zoolit, Spokeo, meeCard and SocialThing come into play. SocialThing just received 300K in funding and has emerged from techstars with high hopes as the “killer app” of 2008.
SocialThing among other startups allow the storage of profile information in a consolidated format from multiple social networks. This information will update across your social networking profiles from there. One killer feature is being able to stay updated with friends across multiple networks and being able to transport friends from one network to the next. For instance, if I have 300 friends in Myspace I can take them into StartupAddict and fill my StartupAddict Rolodex avoiding repeating friend requests all over again. The trend is gaining tremendous momentum and there is room for more players. The right startup will do for social networking what Meebo did for instant messaging.
The portability of data in 2008 is moving at lighting speed and many bellwethers(Google, Verisign, IBM even Yahoo is reported) are porting to OpenID. Reason 103 from my choice in Drupal for SA 2.0. Drupal 6.0 will have OpenID support and has been in the works for most of 2007.OpenID and DataPortability.org to gain major support.
Quick 2008 trend Recap:
(1.) Startup social network aggregators (like SocialThing) will fight for the #1 spot as the goto “destination” or “portal” for all of your social profiles.
(2.) Opensource is big business in 2008 from Facebook to Google open is in and cool and opensource code will allow rapid development by thousands of developers.
(3.) OpenID will become a ubiquitous gateway for individual users, allowing us to traverse multiple social media properties as easy as browsing a basic webpage.
About Tod Whipple
Ujwal,
About a dozen companies play in this arena and only a handful have been funded to my knowledge. The rest are bootstrapping waiting for critical mass or an angel lift. I’ll drop you a more detailed comment on your blog.
No problem Matt.
SocialThing sounds like a great business model and very timely. I look forward to integrating StartupAddict.com 2.0 when we launch.
Tod, besides Social Thing which other start-ups got funded in the field of Social Network Aggregation? Seen a list somewhere?
Thanks
Ujwal
Wow, thanks so much for the mention. You’re right about a lot of things, this is going to be one hot space this year and it’s doubtful that many companies will succeed, but rather, just a handful of really quality ones.
And I do agree that one of our most killer features is the friend portability as well as being able to keep track of the lifestreams of all of your friends, regardless of their network, and regardless of whether or not they’re also socialthing! members.
Make sure you’re on the mailing list and we’ll be sure to get you into the private beta real soon.
Thanks again for the mention!