I am active on more than 30 Social Media sites, and this grows on a weekly basis - as interest in the subject is outweighed by my attempts to rein in the density of my social media footprint. As I write this I am simultaneously scrobbling and checking Twitter, so if feel like I am living in and contributing to the "Hallucinogenic Spirograph".

That might on first inspection appear to be an odd title, and indeed an odd architectural description. I've been thinking over the past number of months about how social media proliferation resembles 'set theory' - you know good old Venn diagrams with commonality intersections between sets.  The sets as I see them are all of the wonderful array of networks, tools, apps, platforms that contribute to the overall experience of social media (for the purpose of this post I refer to this as the "Universal set of functional experience"). The graphic below is intended to be a simplified (and stylised) view. Think of the sets as representing social media offerings such as Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn et al. Set overlaps occur when you can combine (or aggregate) functionality. So I can add Digg widgets to Facebook, hence there is an overlap between the Digg and Facebook set. Now I admit this is a stylised view, as to work out exact overlap points between all systems would be a significant undertaking. I think it would be a study doomed to always be out of date due to the velocity of new offerings in this domain. Also, because there are overlaps within overlaps (within overlaps) I describe some intersections as being highly complex. A key point is that this is very much an organic architecture that is being pulled in multiple directions with little or no overarching design or control.




I see in this view of the world, limited standards (although there are some) and aggregation as an 'ad hoc' activity driven by community demand. The main issues I have with the current overall experience is:

1. Difficult to manage profile sprawl
2. Difficult to manage RSS sprawl
3. App and widget proliferation and sprawl
4. Only partial single sign on (OpenID et al)
5. No single administration point
6. Multiple interfaces and apps needed to traverse the entire functionality set
7. People using a wide range of platforms necessitates many 'needless' accounts - due to commercial pressures not enough interoperability

There are some pretty decent aggregator offerings around at present. Social Media browsing using Flock is a good first stab, pingFM and others are providing aggregation functions to control additional platforms from a single point. Back to my Venn diagram I see this as something akin to that below. Now, none of these currently offers 'comprehensive' functional coverage. It is definitely better than nothing, but it also feels that the problem is accelerating fast as we solve point issues rather slowly.



I started thinking about what this meant in real times, and moving away from the theoretical, below is a partial view of my own social media usage. I see one of the main oddities as the amount of RSS point to point configuration that I have. Now this happens through feed syndication, widgets and apps. A solution might well be to strip everything back down and leave most systems as 'stand alone'. I've done this for example with iTunes, which sits lonely in its green box! That does seem counterintuitive to the overall social media experience and goal, so assuming we'll push feeds into every corner we can get them what might help tidy this up?

It seems to me that RSS mashups would be a place to start. This essentially means configuring a mashup to ingest (consume) source feeds from all of the platform feeds you wish to export. This can be done pretty easily with Yahoo! Pipes. You could also have a look at Microsoft Popfly, Serena, IBM Mashup Center (in beta) and a number of others. The basic idea is to go from n to 1 feeds or n to (a few) feeds. A mashup can inject as well as filter data so you can augment feed streams as well as create specific ones for specific targets (e.g. news mashup or a media mashup). The beauty of mashups is the simplicity and functional richness they support. It also starts to allow you to decouple all of those point to point RSS connections and provide a central point for administration, configuration, and management of existing and new feeds.

Ok, so simple so far - right? Now that my hands are warmed, I'm going to grab something dangly and ask you to cough! What I really really want (and no I'm not scrobbling the Spice Girls - even though I might quite like to) is a unified platform - a social media portal 'if you will' that gives me configurable aggregation. I admit Flock does provide a subset of this, but what I would like to have in a refactored architecture for Social Media, exhibiting the following attributes:

1. Pluggable component framework
2. Interoperability between social networks
3. A standards based / consumer <---> producer model
4. Single sign on across everything I configure in my 'social media portal'
5. Single point of control for personal comments (coComment and Disqus making good inroads)
6. The ability to create feed aggregation and mashup services
7. The ability to create apps (again this could be mashup) as well as control app proliferation through aggregation
8. Profile Manager - create, manage, distribute profile or profile sets through an open API
9. Simplicity in terms of adding emerging offerings
10. Analytics
11. Portal or similar UI (Flock on steroids!) to give me single point access as well as admin control over my social media footprint

The graphic below is a very simplistic logical view. Essentially I want aggregation control in terms of definition and configuration of my own "Universal Set of Functional Experience" using components from any Social Media supplier.

ps. I want it by Monday!


Please do leave comments. I would love to know what other views are in terms of improving the thinking as well as anything I might be missing in terms of systems that exist or are in development.