Just as marketers are finally figuring out what the heck facebook is and why they should be embracing the platform as a way of reaching & engaging their customers and potential customers, there is a new trend developing that may impact facebook and other social mediums…

Enter social aggregators.

Aggregators won’t replace facebook - but much like RSS feeds have supplemented users visting websites directly, social aggregator services could mean marketers looking to reach and engage people through social media sites like facebook will find a smaller direct audience to engage with.

I’ve signed up with socialthing and others are raving about feedfriend. Both do about the same thing - they take updates from all your social media sites like flickr, facebook, twitter, yelp, linkedin and stream them as one interface in something called a “lifestream.”

The idea is great - instead of checking for updates on multiple sites, you can get them all at once - much like how i use Netvibes or Protopage to aggregate all my RSS feeds.

Personally I get everything I need from Netvibes. 

I can add twitter or facebook status updates to Netvibes… and i don’t really care for the extra features social aggregators include such as comments on the different feeds. When I also consider the fact that most of my friends aren’t as geeked out as I am on ‘web 2.0′, it makes even less sense. Just getting my friends on facebook was a monumental task.

Having said that, the mobile interface for Socialthing is a thing of beauty.

They also have an optimized interface for the iphone which makes checking out lifestreams on the go a pleasant experience.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with my RSS feeds (270 currently) - I’m not sure I have enough time (or care enough) to follow the lifestream of every person i know. Having said that, it could be really useful if you are stalking following a few choice people…

How can marketers get in on this?

Websites got around a similar issue when RSS feeds became popular by not including all the content in the feed - so users who liked the lead content were driven back to the site… where sponsored ads could be displayed in all their glory.

One suggestion - build your own branded social aggregator…. and include your own relevant content as one of the feeds.

I could see this working really well for Automotive, Financial, Pharma, Retail… well pretty much any brand looking to participate in & influence a person’s lifestream.

A few months ago I blogged about the impact of facebook on traditional print media. 

Many promoters had stopped printing flyers and started leveraging the power of the social graph available through facebook in order to reach and promote their events.

As reported by Yahoo last week, Yahoo is poised for hundreds of layoffs this week as advertising revenue has dropped significantly. 

Social Media sites have become everything Yahoo used to be - but simpler.  And easier. And more open.

Marketers have followed consumers to popular social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It would appear that facebook has moved on from eating the print shop’s lunch to eating the lunch of Web 1.0 sites.

Who’s next?

Social Media has really evolved over the last 12 months. 

Arguably it started when facebook opened up their platform to developers.  

The number of applications went from 8 to hundreds within weeks and the level of user engagement increased and accelerated.  

Many other major social media sites followed facebook’s lead and announced plans to open up their platform too… most notably Google’s Open Social announcement near the end of the year which had the promise of portability of applications and widgets across multiple platforms.

Many other sites that were struggling to match the pace of facebook’s growth declared that they would also join Open Social so that collectively they could change the landscape of social media once again (maybe this time in their favour).  

There was just one major barrier 

facebook’s social graph meant that people would not easily or quickly leave facebook for another platform - not after investing so much time and effort into creating networks and connecting to friends, family and colleagues. 

As blogged on this site (see links below), it’s unlikely that consumers will abandon or share their online social media time with facebook until their data assets built within facebook became portable to other sites. 

Enter dataportability.org 

Their philosophy is that you own your own data - so you should have the right to do with it as you see fit…like export or port it to another platform, tool, or application. Check out their mission statement here. 

As of now, the group is no more than a round table of smart people looking for a way to materialize a vision…. but what’s interesting is who has joined the round table discussion.  As of today, key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart, Google, facebook and Twitter have joined the conversation.

If this turns out to be more than a PR stunt, this has the potential to be the biggest story of 2008 as true identity portability means we can take our social equity and use it however we see fit - and where ever.

That’s what I’d call Social Media 2.0

Or Identity 2.0

Whatever you want to call it - this is a significant signal that the digital social media space will continue to evolve at a rapid pace this year and we all stand to benefit from this.  

Need to catch up on the conversation? Here are links to some of my previous articles that referenced portability of identity and identity 2.0:  

• Identity 2.0 - where does it begin?
• Open Social not cause for open celebreation….yet