More social aggregation services

A few days ago I wrote about Spokeo; a resource that pulls in content from your contacts, irrespective of their name - it'll go out and start collating information in a rather scary way. There are a few other resources that are doing the same kind of thing: Second Brain is a social content aggregator         that helps people collect, organize, search and share content from multiple online         services in a single library.

Iminta (what are your friends inta?) is still in invitation mode only, but appears to work on the same concept as Spokeo. You tell Iminta the various social networks where you have accounts (delicious, flickr, YouTube, Lastfm, etc.) and the service creates a master list of everything you are up to on those sites. Your friends can then subscribe to your master feed, and/or you to theirs.

Finally we have Friendfeed which collates content from 28 different social networking sites:

• Amazon.com
• Blog
• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Flickr
• Furl
• Gmail/Google Talk
• Google Reader
• Google Shared Stuff
• iLike
• Jaiku
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• Ma.gnolia
• Netflix
• Pandora
• Picasa Web Albums
• Pownce
• Reddit
• SmugMug
• StumbleUpon
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Upcoming
• Vimeo
• Yelp
• YouTube
• Zooomr

I can certainly see the advantages of these resources, and it's fair enough that they just show what information your friends choose to make public. However, the fact that these things can find out details about individuals as they appear in different places and draw it all together in ways that the original 'owner' of the information had not considered as a possibility is a concern. There is also of course the point that some people are not as sensible with their personal data as perhaps they should be.

Edited to add: Pandia has picked up on the Spokeo story, calling it the "'Big Brother' of social networking." They're as concerned about it as I am, and I absolutely agree with their point "Browsing all the info Spokeo makes available to me feels a lot like spying on my friends. And they don’t even know I’m keeping track of them." They also end up by saying "Warning: We don’t recommend that you provide third party services like Spokeo with the password to your online email account."

Comments

[Aaron Newton]

Hi Phil,

My name is Aaron and I work over at Iminta.com. I wanted to note a few things about your post above. First, Iminta supports 26 sites as of today (just shy of FriendFeed's 28). We have coverage for some services that they don't (LibraryThing and GoodReads, for example) and they have some that we don't (we haven't added Amazon yet, for example).

But there's one thing that is relevant to your post that really sets Iminta apart from the others: permissions and filters.

Iminta lets you choose who can see your content at a granular level. You can, for instance, let your friends and family subscribe and see your photos, but not your coworkers. Each service you set up on the site (it takes about 20 seconds to add a service) you can choose who to share it with.

In addition to this, we allow users to filter out content that they aren't interested in. Just because I like your books doesn't mean I like your music. This notion of filtering the view isn't unique to Iminta, but it's a main part of our navigation and a big part of our user experience.

Unlike Spokeo and others, users can only watch content that other users have set up. We don't go scour the internet looking for your footprint and then show what we find to anyone. The notion that this information belongs to you is very important to us.

Thanks for mentioning us in your post! I hope this helps clarify what we have to offer.

-Aaron

[David Bradley]

If you put information about yourself on the web, you're fair game for mashup collators. There's really no difference here between having just one personal web page and it being spidered by every search engine and posting to lots of web2.0 outlets. If you're on, you're in.

db

[Lars Teigen]

I think you have a valid concern. Even though some of these aggragators only pull in content that is already public, it may be presented out of context.

Our synchronization and import of content is still pretty rough and straight forward. But we don't pull inn content that users don't explicitly request. We also give them better control in how it is presented by allowing them to organize it in collections.

If you have any ideas/recommendations on how we should handle this, I would really appreciate your input (email/comment). We're still early stage and we want to play this right.

Thanks,
Lars
Founder/CEO
Second Brain

[Harrison Tang]

Hey Phil, I appreciate your concern, and believe me, we are working hard, trying different things to educate people about their online privacy.

If you read about how our privacy system works, you will find out how much thought we've put into this. We have built a system that will smartly detect and reflect the latest privacy changes on people's content. In the next step, we will help people manage their digital identities online.

Honestly we didn't know what we've created until we created it. Social network aggregation is a very new field, and new technologies will undoubtedly create new possibilities/controversies. We will just need more time to figure out all the kinks, and thank you for helping us understand all the concerns :)