Are Profile Aggregators and Status Ping Tools Good Businesses?

Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 4th, 2008 1:01 PM

Over the past couple years, we saw an upward trend of profile aggregator start-ups hit the market. As we registered for one site after the other, we quickly realized that there was a serious problem with not having a central identity. As a result, thousands of people have tried to release services that help solve the problem. Some of those solutions came under a commercial organization while others were set up as organizations that were run by the collective (e.g. OpenID) and weren’t for profit.

This morning Corvida at Read/Write/Web wrote about one of those profile aggregators that rather than trying to be the destination serves as a control panel for users. It makes a lot sense in theory except for one problem: this is what Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability and Google Friend Connect are trying to accomplish.

The Battle for Our Identities vs Center of Communication

While the few hundred thousand people reading Read/Write/Web, Techcrunch and similar sites will now know about this service (and a small portion will end up using it), the mainstream user will never know about this site. I don’t want to be the pessimist but I think when it comes to the center of identity, the large social networks and potentially the large email providers (GMail, AOL, Yahoo, etc) will become the center of our identities.

In addition the battle for our identities is another battle taking place: the center for our communication. Currently the most likely winners for the center of our communication are the same people winning the battle for our center of identity. There are some new players though as a new form of communication has become ubiquitous: status updates. Suddenly a large group of users are communicating via short-form messages via profile statuses and “micro-blogging” tools.

Statuses have been around for a long time but only recently did we begin to think of those status updates as a two-way conversation. The current platforms winning in this space are Twitter, Facebook statuses (with commenting) and FriendFeed. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) also has status updates but for now it’s still not a two-way communication. That’s because most people sent instant messages as a follow-up to a status on AIM.

As statuses have become available across a number of platforms we are seeing the launch of status pinging tools such as Ping.fm. While all of these tools are great for communication, it still begs the question: how are these companies going to make money?

Are These Businesses?

So Twitter, FriendFeed, Ping.fm, Atomkeep (the tool covered by Corvida this morning) are all useful tools but how on earth are these going to make money? Many of the companies (such as Twitter), will say that they don’t need to make money, they just need to build critical mass and then figure it out. That makes a lot of sense but what happens when Facebook and MySpace adapt and create what is nothing more than a feature change?

On the web, trying to analyze any company’s business model is a relatively mundane task because for the most part there is no model aside from advertising. So why don’t these sites just slap up some ads and start making money? Honestly, I have no idea! Whether or not their future could be doomed by changes that Facebook and MySpace make, they should try to make money while they have the traffic.

Do you think that these companies can generate legitimate business models? Do you think their existence lays in the hands of Facebook and MySpace?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.