Why can’t I check all of my online communities on one page?

As noted in an earlier posting, at a total cost to society of about $150 in administration plus $2 in test materials it was established that I don’t have strep throat. After a week of feeling relieved not to be suffering from strep, but yet coughing and enervated, I went in to see the doctor and he said “Yes, I’m sure that you don’t have strep. All you have is swine flu. Try to get some rest, drink a lot of fluids, and expect the suffering to continue for 10-14 days total.”

The good thing about swine flu is that it gives one a good excuse to sit at the computer and type. In hopes that it will be useful to a team of energetic young programmers, I’ve drafted a complete idea for what should be a viable business: a Web service that conveniently allows someone to read and respond to postings from multiple online communities. Comments would be welcome.

9 thoughts on “Why can’t I check all of my online communities on one page?

  1. Doesn’t this run afoul of the various terms of use of the social networking sites?

    I was thinking that perhaps if the aggregation was implemented as a browser plugin or some other kind of client-side gizmo, it might either not violate the terms, or at least become difficult enough for the sites to block that they would just give up.

    Another idea would be a P2P model that is able to spider 3rd party sites undetected. That is, it is pretty easy to detect spider/agent behavior originating from a few points. If it was distributed across millions of data collectors, though…

    I don’t see why it couldn’t work and be a viable business. It would certainly wreck some others, though.

  2. Ya gotta be kidding. Your section on “who has tried this before” is very brief. This is a grail that has been hoped for for a long time, tried many times, and is thus probably very difficult.

    Back in the days of USENET there was sort of one community on the internet. Well, it was usenet plus mailing lists. There are several reasons that a monoculture or even a synthetic one that comes from standards, runs into trouble. Nobody owns USENET and that was part of its downfall. Because each individual online BB or blog had a different owner who could do what they wanted with it without needing to get agreement from others, they flowered, in spite of being inferior in many ways for users.

    That said I have made many proposals in this area. The most notable one is a recent suggestion to get away from login when login and accounts are not what is needed, and switch to authenticated actions. With authenticated actions, to post a message somewhere (like this blog comment) my browser will know how to perform an authenticated action as a single transaction.

    So in your comment box would not be boxes for my name or a place to login, but rather a text box and a button marked “Post as Brad Templeton” with a drop-down box for alternate identities I might post as. The browser filled in my name, the site knew to generate an authenticated action button/form for my browser.

    One click to perform most actions anywhere.

    http://ideas.4brad.com/authenticated-actions-alternative-login

    Has more details. Of course, in many cases we don’t even need authenticated actions or logins, but the world has decided we must login everywhere in spite of how complex that is, even with single sign on systems

  3. I believe this is already being attempted: Atomkeep, Ping, Posterous, Shareaholic, … Google “manage multiple online profiles” or similar.

    “Convenient” is in the eye of the beholder… 🙂

  4. I would comment that the regex scraping approach is not likely to be viable in the long run. Small changes in the forum code could easily thwart such scraping, and if the popularity of the service grows exponentially it will be difficult to scale the number of programmers to keep pace under the on-demand implementation model.

    A better approach would be to integrate with forum software; a good starting point would be to offer plugin modules for popular forum platforms like vBulletin and phpBB. This has the additional advantage of cooperating with the site operators, and perhaps a mechanism for ad revenue sharing could encourage sites to participate in the system. Perhaps a regex scraping method could be offered for smaller sites with non-standard or lesser known forum software, as well as easy to implement API code which would give such sites the option to update their own forum code to plug in to the aggregation system.

    Another consideration is that while the user should be able to aggregate multiple communities, it is likely that a given user may not want to have a single username/online persona for all of them. A mechanism to use a single sign-in yet allow for distinct user profiles and usernames on various sites would almost seem to be a necessity.

    This cross-community interaction is becoming an issue on Facebook, which has seen a rise in users from older generations. Now grandma can get online and see pictures of her favorite granddaughter’s drunken debauchery from the past weekend. Also, different online communities have different levels of decorum; for example, I have participated in pilot forums where everyone uses their real name and to do otherwise seems suspicious and perhaps even rude, as well as forums populated by foul-mouthed kids from younger generations where everyone uses a pseudonym and someone posting under a real name would probably be mocked and perhaps even harassed.

    The ability to have optional cross-community interaction could also be very interesting (the pilots and photographers can get together and discuss aerial photography, for example), but the user should at least have the ability to opt-out of this behavior.

  5. Philip,

    Have a look at Friendfeed. Not an user myself, but I remember that it’s supposed exactly that : aggregate content from several communities (social networks, in today’s parlance) and allow you to participate in each from this central point.

    It’s enormously popular right now. Is this what you had in mind ?

  6. It looks like you have spare time indeed. You can take your DDL scripts over to apex.oracle.com and create a quick prototype if you want to take this (any other web app ideas) a little further.

  7. Swine flu, which Nobel Laureate Obama has now declared to be a national emergency, has been no worse for me than a standard cold, but a bit harder to shake. Mostly I have been stuck with a persistent cough and a slightly fogged head.

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