Anthony Broad-Crawford

Recently I had twittered about how I felt Yahoo’s OneConnect beat the pants of Plaxo.  After twittering that, and much to my surprise, Plaxo’s Vice President of Marketing John McCrea responded to my tweet asking me why I felt that way.  In my opinion, OneConnect’s advantage boils down to three simple things: my ability to post across platforms, it’s mobile, and it doesn’t require yet another platform specific social network.

Post Across Platforms
One of the problems that faces users of social networking platforms today, albeit a small one, is their inability to post common updates across the multiple social networks they participate in.  Platforms provide niche functionality which allows users to build specific social and professional networks.  For example, LinkedIn is for professional contacts, Facebook for social, Twitter and Tumblr for micro blogging, etc, etc.  Even though users leverage these platforms for specific purposes, users will often want to update their status across all of them.  I personally find it cumbersome to log into multiple platforms to update a particular status.  OneConnect eliminates this cumbersome process and allows users to update their status on multiple social networks with a single post.

It’s Mobile
I have been able to become extremely active with my Tubmlr, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter accounts since I can now access all of them from my mobile device.  I snap a picture, and I can upload it directory to Facebook Flickr, etc.  I have a thought, and I can instantly post on Twitter.  These utilities are now accessible no matter where I go and are integrated into my mobile platform (Phone, Camera, etc).  However, with my increased participation in all these networks, I have finally been exposed to the need for aggregation across them.  OneConnect provides that for me.  Instead of launching multiple applications serially to find out what is going on, I simply launch OneConnect.  This is a significant advantage in my opinion.

YASN
Yet another social network.  The honeymoon is over for me; I no longer get excited about building and cultivating a social network from the ground up.  I have spent plenty of hours building my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn networks.  I will admit that they will continue to demand my time as they grow. However, starting from zero again seems dreadful to me (reminds me a lot of rolling a new character in a MMO).  Even going through and importing from my existing accounts seems tedious.   OneConnect doesn’t require me to build another social network to aggregate the updates.  It simply leverages my existing social networks in their current states.  This gives it a distinct advantage over Plaxo.

On Plaxo, I have to build yet another social network.  Additionally, once I have completed building my social network, my friends must then add their other social networking accounts as feeds, and finally, allow me to see their updates.  There are just so many barriers to entry here.  On OneConnect, I just added my login information for my accounts and I was done.  In roughly five minutes I was receiving aggregated updates from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.  It didn’t require those additional steps by me, or more importantly, my friends.

I initially felt that mobile was the biggest advantage.  However, after taking time to really think about this topic, not having to build another social network is the biggest for me.  If Plaxo launched a mobile application tomorrow, it still would take time before it became useful as an aggregation tool for me (if ever).  Building a social network, and getting all my friends to add all their feeds is too much of a hassle (for all parties involved).  I have already built these social networks and would not want to do it again.

Why I am still pulling for Plaxo
I am still pulling for Plaxo after all this.  Their service, in general, is superior.  It’s more robust (they include far more services then OneConnect), they support more feeds, and it’s more stable.  OneConnect is buggy, slow, and limited in the accounts I can add.  If Plaxo can get into the mobile space, and remove some of the limitations I mentioned, Plaxo wins.  It would be to good of a product to turn down.  Until then, I will be launching my OneConnect application.

Last Thing
I am very impressed by John McCrea actually reaching out and engaging a random user of both their and a competitors product.  I will be honest and say that may be one of the reasons why I am in the end pulling for Plaxo.  Knowing Plaxo is user focused and willing to reach out and engage their users to identify how they can improve their product is impressive.

I recently blogged about how I was looking to participate in solving the social network profile interoperability problem.  I am both proud and excited to say I am now a part of Dataportability Healthcare Task Force.  Currently we are in the preparation phase.  However, look for some white papers beginning relatively soon.

Currently, I belong to several social networking platforms.  This includes Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and soon to be released Twine, and Stack Overflow.  That is a lot of social networking platforms.  More importantly, as the industry trends to more specific social and professional networks, the number of networking platforms I belong to will increase. If the industry continues to proliferate at its current rate, I will probably belong  to around eleven or twelve sites over the next year.

The fact that I will belong to so many social / professional networking sites does not upset me.  In fact,  it is the exact opposite, it excites me. Each site will most likely provide an incredible amount of value specific to its vertical.  For example, I would love social networking sites specific to product development, start up life, software development, and management.  I would gain a tremendous amount if I could interact and collaborate with my peers in those specific areas.  However, what I don’t look forward to, is having to maintain so many versions of my profile.

The sheer amount of time it would take to maintain all my profiles, which are really alternate presentations of my resume, is daunting.   More importantly, as these sites specialize around professional areas, my need to keep my profiles accurate and current, increases.  That means, for each experience I want to add to my profiles, I will have to log into several sites and make the same change, over and over again.  This is clearly an annoyance.

I bring this up, as it is currently a problem with professional networking platform I manage.  We are a professional networking platform for the medical industry.  This includes physicians, researchers in the health sciences, nurses, and more.  Each of these users has an extremely rich profile that contains a lot of information.  Currently, our users note that maintaining these profiles even for their institutions is extremely time consuming.  So here we are asking them to create and maintain duplicate.  Additionally, we import and export these profiles in a format specific to the organization we are dealing with.  Meaning, per each organization we interface with, we translate our representation of the users  profile into a format the organization understands.  This isn’t very efficient for anyone involved.

Additionally, independent of our platform, the medical industry is starting to embrace cross institution online collaboration. These future platforms will have the same problem of multiple profiles, and no consistent way of sharing the information the same as ours.  Continuing to create multiple versions of the profile, and one off representations and communication protocols will not scale.

A single representation , communications protocol, and repository for a physicians profile is needed.  That being said, I am now venturing into creating a profile protocol and repository for the medical industry.  I am not going lone wolf, instead, I am getting involved in the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) project and the Data portability project.  I will look to spearhead the medical and scientific pieces.  I don’t know if these will be the final solutions, but it is where I am going to start.

As I progress, I will update through this blog.  Please stay posted.