social aggregators

I really don't get what all the hoopla is about “lifestreams” or “social aggregators”. They are all over the place these days and frankly I'm getting quite sick of them. If you have no clue what I'm talking about, Dan Taylor has a great review of 15 lifestream services (Mashable has a similar survey of 20 aggregators).

First of all, there is nothing new in the technology. It is almost trivial to write your own bare bones feed aggregator. Here is a ugly, skeletal social aggregator in THREE lines of Python (note that I'm not counting the list of the feeds itself) using the excellent Feed Parser module:

feeds = [
"http://del.icio.us/rss/diwakergupta",
"http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/diwakergupta/recenttracks.rss"
]
 
import feedparser
for feed in feeds:
    result = feedparser.parse(feed)
    print result.entries

Granted its not pretty, but you can imagine its not terribly hard to make it pretty. Even otherwise, Planet has been around for almost forever, even before RSS and feeds took off like they have recently. There are plugins that achieve the same for pretty much any platform you can think of: Wordpress, Drupal, Dokuwiki, Mambo, Joomla – you name it, and they probably have RSS aggregation built in.

So if technology is not the bling, what is? Undoubtedly its the social aspect of it, I hear you say! Don't we have enough social networks already? Are you so bored by the flood of updates in your FaceBook mini-feed, that you want to engage in yet another social network that has all of your feeds?

And finally, what exactly is the business model? Everyone likes to throw around words like “revenue”, “monetization”, “personalization”, “value aggregation”, “API” etc but we have yet to see a demonstrably sustainable model. Others have raised similar concerns.

I can't help but sense a much-ado-about-nothing kind of feeling. I rest my case with FriendFeedFeed.