Last night I went to the 6th
Beers and Innovations Event run by NMK. The topic under discussion was "Aggregators and Upsetters".
We were very keen on hearing Paul Pod speak about
TIOTI (Tape It Off The Internet), which we feel plays strongly to our views about MyPCTV media, but the overall discussion was very good, touching on Edge vs Central aggregators, old world vs online aggregators, Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 aggregation, and the value add of aggregation in general. However, chatting to the ReeVoo guys afterwards it was clear that they have pushed B2B Web 2.0 practice quite a long way forward (most Web 2.0 stuff is very much B2C right now), which I will cover in another post.
There were three very interesting questions that came up:
(i) What is the shape of an aggegator after social networks are just part of the knitting
(ii) What keeps an aggregator valid (ie given Friendster, will MySpace be around in 5 years time)
(iii) Given that its our user produced content in the Web 2.0 aggregators, when will they start paying us
Post Web 2.0, What is the shape of an Aggregator
Aggregation as a function has moved on from physical places (pre Portals?), through on-line search Portals, to social network Portals - and there is a sense that these are layers being built on top of each other - thus, what is the next layer.
Early days, but I think this will be driven by the next 2 questions , ie what keeps aggregation valid - and what is our payback.
I think it is all about value. in particular transaction value. Communication systems through the ages have tried to reduce the costs of (i) finding information and (ii) disseminating/transmitting information.
The 'Net dropped the cost of dissemination by at least an order of magnitude, the searchable Web reduced the ability to find it by a similar amount. (There is a marvellous book called
The Victorian Internet that shows this is not new - well worth reading) Social networks have increased search efficiency by digitising the "Wisdom of Crowds" effect. So what will increase the usefulness?
I think there are 3 key things that will occur next:
(i) Putting "people like me" into the Social Net - a recommendation by someone unlike me is not helpful and as Reevoo CEO noted it is useful to know they have actually experienced the event/product/etc - I expect a rush into this area
(ii) Portability of Identity - There are too many sites asking for my details, and as (say) MySpace becomes less cool I want to be able to federate my social nets across all my social network sites
(iii) Video - the endgame is Video....I don't know how it will happen, but Video based media will be a key part of the next wave. All I can say at this point is that aggregation won't work the way it does now as Video is a different medium.
What Keeps an Aggregator Valid?
This exercised some furious debate, but my take on it is that it is simple - its us. So long as we find an aggregator does what we want it do do, it is valid. There are tactical things an aggregator can do, so for e.g. Friendster was less "user friendly" than MySpace, and Yahoo and Google have different flavours - but there is also a Zeitgeist - for example word on the street is that MySpace is passe, Bebo and Facebook are now "in".
I suspect therefore that aggregators have to follow the trends of "us", the smart mob - as we become familiar with each new layer, our wants change. Key trends I see emerging are:
(i) Trust - as more of our life is online, we increasingly need to trust our providers with that data - identity fraud and the abuse of our data are going to be real problems (I have talked a bit more abouth this on
TechCrunch
(ii) Multi-media services - we will want to access services over PC, mobile and (probably) TV
(iii) Accessability - we are not putting our eggs in any one basket, and we want to be able to access various services - and transfer between them - fairly simply
When will they start paying us?
Many years ago I attended a Futures Workshop in Washington DC, and one of the sessions was on the value of a vendor knowing my Net Present Value over my life. As you can imagine, the value is far, far greater than the pittance that a storecard or Nectar like system pays you.
However, there is already value returned to us in using a desirable aggregation service. One question asked last night was "since YouTube used our content and sold for $1.65bn, should they not be paying us?" In YouTube's case when you sign the upload agreement you sign the rights over to them (in that respect at least they are a true Old Media aggregator), and clearly enough people thought the bargain was worth it for accessing everyone else's content easily.
In addition, we get value returned by allowing advertisers to sponsor the aggregator and advertise to us, and thus get the service at a lower price (a faustian bargain to be sure, but we all seem to like like Free)
Unless of course someone forms a C2B aggregator for us that then blends our buying power and sells this data to the retailers - but then will this aggregator pay us?
I can imagine people will eventually start paying us, but it will be done in the form of subsidies, and will probably require us to "opt in" to the services to get around privacy restrictions.
