Long live the social aggregator

There is absolutely enormous opportunity in the social aggregator application space. Ujwal Tickoo nails the basic reason an aggregator is needed: users are members of more than one social network, thus there will always be a need for a great aggregator. Check out the telling chart that reveals the user overlap among the different sites. Mashable has a nice writeup of the state of the art in the social aggregator field. The hard part is of course that social networks aren’t yet truly open with a user’s data. For instance, the only way to get your news feed items from Facebook is to scrape the site, which is prohibited by their terms of use. It’s going to take a lot of user pressure for Facebook to open up their data silo, but when they do, all sorts of aggregators will try their hand at creating the next great killer app.