I came across this article about identity aggregation today written by a friend of mine: Mike Gunderloy; Mike and I worked together a couple of years ago on Web Services magazine stuff. Anyway, Mike says the social network aggregation hasn't reached a sweet spot since there is no huge uptake yet. I agree - and the reason for massive adoption is that most social networks duplicate our relationships (and hence the Social Networking Fatigue) - but in reality though, we do maintain number of different identities in life and we also do maintain a number of different networks of people (with some overlap). For example, I have friends at my work (LinkedIn), at my school (Facebook) and in my neighborhood (fatdoor); these networks are very different in nature and involve different people and are complementary to each other.

So in order to create value in identity aggregation, one has to approach the problem in aggregating different dimensions of a profile that does not overlap. And of course, that also depends on number of things such as open-ness of the networks and so on to ensure the interoperability of the networks. At fatdoor, we are working on several fronts to make our neighborhood network open - also please send me if you have any cool ideas on this front.

So, my question to you is - what is more valuable? Aggregating different dimensions of an identity or aggregating social networks irrespective of their dimensions?

Labels: explore, fatdoor

A couple of users have sent me emails asking if fatdoor works on Safari and Firefox etc. So, I thought I would follow-up with a post on this. Here is what we currently support:

- Firefox - On Windows and Mac
- IE (6 & 7) - On Windows

Also please note that we are working on a number of known issues for Safari support and will post an update on that later.

In the mean time if you see any issues, please send them using http://www.fatdoor.com "contact" form (We are reading each and every single mail that comes through) or you can directly send them to me at chandu@fatdoor.com

Cheers,
Chandu Thota
Co-Founder & CTO
http://www.fatdoor.com

Just wanted to a quick update on a couple of things.

fatdoor's messaging capabilities (such as sending emails, friend requests etc) were down this evening from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM due to our mail server down time (note to myself: post a blog entry "before" we are down next time). But please note that, none of your friend requests or sign-ups are lost during this time, they were simply queued and processed as soon as we are back up at 5:30 PM.

Based on the feedback so far, the "shoutout" feature is one of the most loved features on fatdoor; for those who haven't played with fatdoor, "shoutout" is a simple way of keeping in touch with your neighborhood online - think of it as your "news feed" for the neighborhood (you can actually subscribe to it via any feed reader too) that is generated by your neighbor activity.

We are getting a lot of feedback from our early Alpha users (both feature requests and bugs) and we are working on them quickly to roll out what you are asking for. So, please keep it coming!

As always, I can be reached at this blog or at my email: chandu@fatdoor.com

Cheers,
Chandu Thota
Co-Founder & CTO
http://www.fatdoor.com