An idea has been floating around in my head ever since we began working with Workstreamer. Or maybe not just an idea as much as the seed for a manifesto. Perhaps just a strategic principle.
Aggregate or be aggregated.
It's been bugging me for months, with roots in the portal wars of the mid-1990s. At the time every internet company's obsession was eyeballs. AOL, Excite, Yahoo!, Lycos, et al. were busy fighting to become your browser's default web page by aggregating the best content.
Then we had the rise of e-commerce. I built and managed PUMA's online stores, watching comparison shopping engines like MySimon and Froogle fight for attention as one-stop product information aggregators.
Most recently, social networks have become relationship aggregators. Friendster, then MySpace, now Facebook. Maybe Twitter will continue its meteoric rise and topple Facebook. It actually doesn't matter.
Here's why. The path to maximum value capture for all of these companies is by pwning a space. The more you dominate, the more money you make, and the less you want someone else siphoning off your eyeballs, affiliate clicks, or active users. So services establish barriers, API limits, etc. - and they ultimately end up as walled gardens, valuable only to those who don't eat apples and are content to frolic inside. This won't work in the long run because information wants to be free.
And Google is the master aggregator.
All those portals that didn't work out? Google. Need click-throughs to product listings? Google. Walled garden social network? In 2007, Facebook opened up to public search. Earlier this year, Twitter changed its title structure for better search indexing. Here comes everybody...no wait, it's just Google again.
There's a lesson in here for brands, and it's not "bow down to your Gmaster." Fred Wilson recently blogged, "aggregation is the central element of distributing content on the web." Steve Rubel hails the end of the destination web era. Jeremiah Owyang lets you know about your irrelevant corporate website. Let's face it: your corporate website is sunk cost.
An answer is inherent in social business design. It's not command-and-control, nor is it inmates running the asylum. It's a measured approach to how people, process, and technology can be applied to create value. It's about proactive aggregation, not reactive right-click copy protection.
Aggregate or be aggregated.
