Ok, where do I start here? Doesn’t this remind you of the old portal’s?
Many things have been said about the Myspace’s Facebook’s and the Israeli social network TheMarker Cafe and their many features/widgets (blog’s, forums, like-linkedin services, e-mail, like-twitter services… and the list is endless) .
This may currently be a very unpopular view, especially as 60% of the world’s Internet users are estimated to be in one of the social network sites [my profiles alone consist at least 12.5% of the 60% world-wide figure] however, this aspiration to tie your users to your site by providing them all they need, so they don’t go else-where belongs to the web 1.0 days…
If you allow people to go, and do whatever they feel like on the web, then you may get new innovative ideas/businesses. Tie them to your all-in-one services and you get lousy content. Open API’s, mash-up’s and new tools that make mash-up’s even easier to create promise to become a strong force on the web. Instead of many sites where you get all-in-one people will also be able to use many of services offered as their building blocks to be used for their own needs and creations.
If you’ve ever tried to maintain a social entity on one of these sites you’ve probably discovered that its a full-time day+night job. Takes time to master the many features they each offer with their unique ways of delivering them, that is if you have the time. Most people don’t have the time. And to make things worse, many open a few entities, which produces lousy content.
Why not produce great single, flexible, much needed applications with open API’s, preferably open source app’s, that are easy to maintain by the end user (and the service provider), and that can easily be tied to other services/applications. Even Google with its many applications releases them one-at-a-time.
Techbowl 