The Real McCrea

Every few months, I like to check in to see how the ‘pure-play webide aggregators” are doing. [Disclosure/reminder: I head up marketing at Plaxo.]

This is getting ever more complicated, as webwide lifestream aggregation is becoming the blueprint for the Social Web, as instantiated in the UX for Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, in addition to the smaller players who blazed the trail (Plaxo, launched mid-2007, and FriendFeed, a few months later).

Here’s the latest from Compete.com (which, like all other traffic-trackers, has its issues, but is generally directionally-correct).:

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch shines a spotlight on the FriendFeed side of the growth issue in a post this evening, leveraging Comscore data. Michael, in his poetic way, describes FriendFeed as being in danger of being “the coolest app no one uses.”

I don’t know which services will end up being the big winners in this emerging Social Web space, but I do know for sure that we will witness an explosion of innovation that will mirror what we saw in 1994, 1995, and 1996, with lots of losers and a few big winners. Personally, I am very excited to see what happens!