Social and the web, Open Source Idea No.1

Anything social is going to be the highlight of the web in 2007 no doubt. This will be the year that such sites catering to the concept will come of age and the good ones will be separated from the boring ones. The good ones will innovate get more financing and build better and larger web communities and make a brand for themselves. Other similar sites that can't compete with marketing or promotion will just die out naturally and be relegated to be sold on ebay (if they manage) or just basically shut down.

Marketing seems to be key as people cannot remember weird names that are being given to startups nowadays. Why? because it isn't relatable to any real word scenario. When was the last time you thought of famster to make a blog/website for yourself. WordPress or blogger would be more obvious choices right.

You think of sharing photos and you think of and relate to flickr, webshots, smugmug,  photobucket (though primarily used for image hosting). Firstly the names are just stand outs as they relate to the product being offered. Zooomr has forever been in beta and doesn't look like it's going to come out of it anytime soon. Plus I often see myself typing it with one "o" missing.

So what's the use of all these

• photo sharing sites
• video sharing sites
• RSS feeds and so on

especially since you probably end up making different profiles on each one and don't use it enough as you have to log in everytime you visit. Sometimes it can be addressed with password managers and not clearing out sessions, but then again not everybody does so.

I have an idea that I think might work if anybody out there would care to build it and it's some sort of a mother of all social manager sites where it's already pre-populated with all major social sites from your flickrs to your youtubes to your facebook. Ok so you're saying yeah there is already something like that its called netvibes and pageflakes where I can add all the content I want to see from whatever site I want to add. True, BUT...

Here I'm not just talking about another start page but also a way too somehow be able to through either a script or access to API's (no idea how those work) be able to create a master profile and then select which sites you want to be a part of and create a similar or sub profile on all social sites that you wish to sign up with and have them all be manageable through a master control panel along with the ability to view the content from within your control panel. You with me still? Good...

Ok so far here's the concept

1. A master social start page
2. One master username and password
3. The ability to sign up with user selected social sites with the same profile or make separate profile details for each site (or a group of sites)
4. Being able to manage each site (or group) that you have signed up with and view content from within your control panel
5. Easily integrate RSS
6. Add, delete or share content easily from your master control panel
7. Be able to easily switch between each site

Now I have no idea if this is possible but it probably would work if sites allow the functionality of this master social control panel to be compatible with the way their profile creating system works.

Why would this be useful? Well, its needed that's why. (at least that's what I think)

You have one tab in firefox, and IE (finally) for your video browsing, the other one for uploading photos, the other one for checking email and a few others for news and general browsing. You could easily get rid of the video, photo and news tabs by just having one tab running your master control panel and one more for the email and general browsing. So from 5 tabs you have gone down to 3.

Email may as well be integrated as a feature for the service and you get rid of one more tab. Cool so now we have only 2 open at any given time. No more multiple tab jumping, closing tabs by mistake and firing up RAM and hearing that annoying CPU fan feel like it's going to fry any second.

The experience would be easily convenient as you would log into your control panel, see the sites that you have signed up (which would also have the same profile details) and you would easily be able to upload, view and share just like you would do if the site were open in another tab (or window).

The main difference between this and other start pages is the ability to have one central profile around all social sites that require sign up to experience more of their functions, AND the ability to manage your profile and update information like email change or personal info like address etc...if provided across all sites at once. Of course meaning which you would be able to sign up with them through your master control panel in the first place.

Your daily tasks of seeing what's happening on all user generated content sites just becomes easier to view and manage as you have to only one master username and password to ever log into all of them at once.

Maybe it's already been done, maybe somebody already has it in a development phase somewhere. I don't know but its an idea and if it is already in practise somewhere let me know so I can close my other tabs and just use one central control panel to access and log into all my social sites at once, I tried netvibes it didn't let me create one central profile for all sites I visit or let me upload videos to youtube or pictures to flickr.

Please comment and let me know, I will make any necessary updates as I come across them.

Technorati Tags: open source, web 2.0, social bookmarking

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