As you know, I’m all over “social networking” — Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Delicious, etc. — but there’s a new(ish) breed of sites trying to put themselves in the same category that can barely hide their primary goal: aggregating data. Gowalla was the first of these I’d heard about, thanks to Packrat, the stupidly addictive game I play on Facebook, which is by the same parent company. In fact, I have an account on Gowalla, but I quickly discovered it was useless without a smartphone and its location data. In hindsight, I’m pretty happy I’ve never been able to make it work.
Gowalla is a lot like FourSquare: you “check in” and earn badges and in some cases get deals — of course Facebook got in on the act, too, with its uber-intrusive Places feature that allows other people to tag your location unless you change your privacy settings. Even Google also has a location-based service, Latitude, which is REALLY frightening when you start to link it to the other geolocation data they collect and catalog. It’s also potentially amusing.
Today, I heard about Miso which lets you share what you’re watching and earn badges along the way [insert exaggerated eye roll here] and of course there’s iTunes new Ping feature which does the same for music. To be fair, Ping is late to the game, following Last.fm, iLike and others.
I’ve used some of the Ping predecessors without really thinking about the data that was there to be mined but Miso and Ping make it all so painfully in-your-face. I am henceforth referring to this style of web “service” as Social Aggregating rather than Networking because it’s all about linking what you like, buy and/or do to your demographic. While Amazon has been doing this for ages with its suggestions, I guess I feel like that is part of the customer relationship, no different than a bricks-and-mortar bookstore staff member suggesting a different author when I run out of books in my favourite series. When I look at Miso and Ping, all I see is a giant database with a direct line to the Networks and the Record Labels respectively; I don’t see a network, just a pipeline.