In the beginning it was RSS feeds.

Then the Internet Gods said “Let us share our RSS feeds”

And thus was born Google Shared feeds which in turn begat other providers of shared feeds.

The Internet Gods seeing this was good decided that it would be even better if you could lump all your shared feeds, social network nudges etc etc etc all together.

And thus was born the aggregator and more aggregators and more and more and….

It has gotten to the point a day doesn’t go by that I don’t read about or get notified of some new way collect your internet information flows or an existing one taking on new users. As soon as someone comes up with a little different way to amalgamate your information it seems that a handful of people will come out with the same idea only a little bit different.

This has happened to social networks to the point that people are finding it more work that it is worth. Along with this tiredness of the same ol’ - same ol’ many of the big social networks are beginning to see a gradual decline in eyeballs visiting the sites. Douglas Karr equates this being much the same as the urban blight many real life communities experience

The problem is pretty basic, it’s urban blight. When I lived in Phoenix, Arizona for a year I read a lot about the urban blight that was taking place. Back in the late 80s, the suburbs of Phoenix were growing at such a demanding rate, that no one could keep up with the core - downtown. As neighborhoods became overly packed and traffic became a mess, people moved to newer neighborhoods.

These new neighborhoods had new schools, new homes, more land and trees, and great neighbors - not to mention clean air and lots of room to move around. You became closer to your neighbors… since they didn’t move in and out all the time… attending social events and talking over the fence.

Applied to Social Media, I believe we’re seeing the same thing happen. The core of Digg is experiencing blight right now - the users that helped create the service that became so popular are becoming disenchanted and are searching for alternatives. With MySpace, the answer was Facebook. Now Facebook has grown as large as MySpace and the same plateaus are occurring - this time at rapid speed.

I foresee the same thing happening to information aggregators as we are becoming flooded with them to the point that it is just too much work to keep up with them. Where we use to flit from new social network to newer social network we are doing the same thing with our aggregators.

As Louis Gray pointed out today when he posted about yet another new aggregator that if 2007 was about social networks like Facebook and Twitter he thinks that 2008 is going to be all about link blogs like LinkRiver or AssetBar the two newest members of a flooded field. Like social networks though I wonder how long it will be before they to start to suffer from the type of blight that Douglas talks about.

For me though that point has already been reached. If I was to join in every link blog aggregator I would be spending more time managing them than I would be reading about the very news they are aggregating. There comes a point when too much is really just too much and as it happened to social networks it will happen to link blog aggregators.

Conversation Tags: RSS, aggregators, social networks, overload, link blogs