The Dis-Aggregation of Aggregators

Two related posts on Techmeme today about how people consume all that wonderful online media - one from Louis Gray, one from A VC (Fred Wilson).

Louis Gray first:

1) It always starts with e-mail. E-mail helps me know what's actionable. From e-mail, I can find out and act on:

2) Reading Google Reader, I can catch up on the night's blog posts, add items to my link blog, or open posts in a new tab to bookmark or comment.

3) I'll open Twitter and do a quick scan of the first few pages of "tweets" from those I'm following to see what the discussions of the day are. I'll also check the replies tab to see if anybody tried to send me a message where action is required.

4) I head to FriendFeed....unlike the first three, which feel like work, where there is an action that needs to take place, or a task that needs clearing, FriendFeed is more like the finish line, where I can finally relax and engage with peers.

5) Additional activity

Then Fred:

I have moved away from reading individual blogs. I want to read aggregation services like techmeme, hacker news, reddit, twitter, delicious popular, digg, etc, etc. I find that they give me a much better view of the top stories of the day than reading individual blogs does.

However, Fred notes the same concerns I would, which is that this is not how most people behave online:

But once again, what I do doesn't map very well to what the average audience member does. I think I need to remind myself of that fact on a daily basis.

My view is simpler than all this - We don't actually need all these new aggregators. Between the Old Aggregators (email and RSS reader) I got everything I required story-wise - the new ones are by and large just adding complexity without really solving my main problem, which is filtering the firehose of stuff coming at me every day into smething manageable. (Clarification - by this I don't mean that they are not fun, diverting, interesting - just that they dont really add value if you already are set up on RSS, email etc, they merely re-arrange where you get the same old same old stuff from). In fact I find it fascinating that services that are just by and large glorified RSS readers are getting funding left, right and centre, whereas something I actually found useful - BlogFriends - could not. Ahead of its time, or just suffering from being UK based I wonder?

After playing with various new services, I have come to the conclusion that having to go down multiple aggregation rat-holes is just a waste of my (limited) time. In fact over the last 4 months or so I find Techmeme and Twitter are turning into the best personal filter/aggregator, simply because on Techmeme I can see the "big issues" and on Twitter I can see what the sort of stuff people I follow are reading, giving some form of "Serendipity infill" (Twitter has changed usage since about December to be far less drivel based in my observation).

Now, I play with all these new things just to see how they work, but my colleagues at Broadsight think that most of it is a total waste of time for "real world use", they're waiting for some form of market leading service to emerge - and these guys are geeks rather than Social Media people, so if they are fairly underwhelmed I can't imagine what the rank and file is like.

In fact, the one thing I really, really want now is a "Reverse Aggregator" - that combines everything occurring in multiple aggregators that is relevant to me, and re-sorts it back into a format and place where I want to see it - comments onto my blog, posts into me email or RSS reader etc.