The browser for your conversation graph

There is a discussion on Techmeme about Seesmic Desktop vs TweetDeck. While the comparison is interesting, the bigger point is the strategic importance of these conversation aggregators. I think they are are a powerful area to think about because they are the consumer interface to our conversation graph.

These conversation aggregators control the browsing of our conversations. They have the potential to create powerful value propositions if they play their cards right. For example:

- they can recommend relevant discussions and people to you based on your preference and what you have consumed and talked about (essentially overtaking Mr Tweet)
- they can add value to the links such as extracting the articles from the links and presenting them in another column
- they can allow users to add layers on data on top of the conversations i.e. think of social gestures, ratings, tags etc
- they can suggest useful tags for findability

Now, the interesting question is who is going to open up first. Currently, conversation aggregators are competing on features. Going forward, they will be competing on openness as well as their abilities to create the business ecosystem. Who is going to the first in giving people access to their platform so that they can create better services for everyone else?

In order words, who is going to the Firefox for conversation agreggators? (Btw, Firefox is a busienss that is grossing over 100M a year in revenue.)


This post draws a lot of references from the following posts:
Technorati, Bloglines, and The Economics of Feeds
How to Arbitrage Micromedia, pt 1
How to Chrome your Industry
Don’t create a company, create an ecosystem