social media

Social Media Points of Failure

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Facebook has just added a lot of new features to its offering, buttons and graphs and likes and widgets galore.  Of course among the various discussions about Facebook, one issue keeps  coming up is that Facebook, as it gets bigger, is a single point of failure in people's online lives and identities.

If you think back, there have been a lot of "single points of failure" in peoples online lives.  I remember when ICQ was the big chat program, when LinkedIn had no competitors, when everyone worried about Twitter owning people's lives (remember that?).  There's always a worry that some provider or web service will dominate everything – and then bad things will happen with hackers, TOS changes, etc.

So we've had a lot of worry about points of failure in our internet lives.  Though I have yet to see a Great Online Life Destruction Debacle, it is a possibility of course.  However,  I've watched many a gloom and doom story about the internet and have yet to see Netageddon happen.

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Social Media: Integration is next

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So Facebook gets Friendfeed.  A big social media sites get what is essentially a social media aggregator, ensuring of course they have more social media aggregation.

At this rate there are an insane amount of social media sites out there (just take alook at a few of them at http://knowem.com/).  There are many more sites that aggregate some of their information in feeds, gizmos, etc.

To lay it out blatantly, social media aggregation and integration is going to be the new norm.  Social media became a norm, and it also became so incredibly widespread it's hard to track which service you're using.

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